Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. We construct two new metadata...

Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along multiple dimensions, clashes with often vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short note proposes three methodological...

This paper is intended as a contribution to the debate about the relationship between economic growth and national objectives, and the way in which achievement of the latter can be assessed by alternative indicators of economic and social performance. Faster growth of GDP is an instrumental...

This paper proposes to use an information theory approach to the design of multidimensional poverty indices. Traditional monetary approaches to poverty rely on the strong assumption that all relevant attributes of well-being are perfectly substitutable. Based on the idea of the essentiality of...

Employment is the main source of income for most families in the world. While it is certainly not a new dimension of well-being, it is sometimes forgotten in human development studies and poverty reduction policies or, at least, not considered in the depth it deserves. This paper proposes seven...

Measures of multivariate well-being, such as poverty or inequality, are scalar functions of matrices of several attributes, m, associated with a number of individual or households, N. This entails inevitable "aggregation" and summarization over individuals as well as attributes. There is no...

We propose to measure inequality of well-being with a multidimensional generalization of the Gini coefficient.  We derive two inequality indices from their underlying social evaluation functions.  These functions are conceived as a double aggregation functions: one across the dimensions of...