This paper evaluates the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life lost (LY) to the pandemic. Additional years spent in poverty (PY) are conservatively...

Absolute poverty lines aim to track a fixed poverty standard consistently. There are two main approaches for the construction of absolute poverty lines. The "welfaristic" approach tracks a fixed level of utility, and the "objective" approach tracks a fixed list of achievements. As they yield...

Many developing countries' official poverty methodologies rely on nonstandard poverty lines, which complicate poverty comparisons across space or time. The paper considers the case of the Arab Republic of Egypt, whose official poverty lines have two important nonstandard features. First, the...

This study compares the magnitude of national level losses that the COVID-19 pandemic inflicted across three critical dimensions: loss of life, loss of income, and loss of learning. The well-being consequences of excess mortality are expressed in years of life lost, while those of income losses...

Over the period 1990-2015, many countries experienced a reduction in extreme absolute poverty and an increase in relative poverty. As a result, the global trend of “overall” income poverty, which combines absolute and relative poverty, may depend on arbitrary normative choices such as the...

Multidimensional well-being indicators have the potential to reduce the "bias” associated to monetary indicators. However, they face stringent data constraints. This paper studies the construction of indicators that strike a balance between (i) reliability in approximating conceptually sound...

Simple welfare indices such as mean income are ubiquitous but not distribution sensitive. In contrast, existing distribution sensitive welfare indices are rarely used, often because they are difficult to explain and/or lack intuitive units. This paper proposes a simple new distribution sensitive...