Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP14059
Authors: Jean-Marie Baland; Benoit Decerf; Guilhem Cassan
Abstract: Most measures of deprivation concentrate on deprivation among the living population and, thus, ignore premature mortality. This omission leads to a severe bias in the evaluation of deprivation. We propose three different measures that combine information on poverty and premature mortality of a population in a meaningful manner. These indices are consistent and satisfy a number of desirable properties unmet by all other measures combining early mortality and poverty. Moreover, these measures are readily computable with available data and easily interpretable. We show that omitting premature mortality leads to an underestimation of total deprivation in 2014 of at least 30% at the worldlevel. We also show that the ranking in terms of deprivation of countries is substantially changed with our measures, and that our nderstanding of the evolution of countries’ deprivation may be reversed when taking premature mortality into account.
Keywords: deprivation; measurement; premature mortality; composite indices
JEL Codes: D63; I32; O15
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| premature mortality (J17) | total deprivation (I30) |
| omission of premature mortality (J17) | underestimation of total deprivation (I32) |
| new indices (ID, GD, ED) (C43) | nuanced understanding of deprivation (I32) |