Multidimensioned Approaches to Welfare Analysis

Abstract

A general survey of multidimensional approaches to the measurement and comparisons of welfare situations is provided. The survey covers some aspects of welfare representation, data availability and experience, axiomatic characterization of inequality measures, existing multidimensional indices, the stochastic dominance alternative for comparing welfare situations, and mobility. Applications to national and international data are described. The paper emphasizes implementability issues and statistical methods in the context of a comparative analysis of the philosophical and theoretical desirability of alternative approaches.