Inclusive Absolute Well-Being Changes. An Application with Multidimensional Cross-Country Analysis

The world has continued to witness prosperity in terms of poverty reduction and well-being improvement, but one cannot overstate the importance of examining whether the improvement is evenly shared or is being inclusive to all. In this paper, we propose a general quartile-based approach based on absolute changes that allow assessing and robustly examining inclusiveness of well-being for non-monetary indicators that are bounded in nature and can have both attainment and shortfall representations. Our empirical analysis of inclusiveness uses a multidimensional measure of well-being that is closely linked to the flagship global multidimensional poverty index and examines inclusiveness of well-being changes for 80 developing countries covering six different geographic regions. We observe robust improvements in well-being for most countries in our study, but only around three-fifth of all countries show robust inclusiveness. Further geographical analyses show that the same figure is less than one-third for the sub-Saharan African region. Our proposed framework could play an important role in jointly meeting the SDG targets of reducing inequality within countries and reducing poverty in multiple dimensions.

Speaker:

Suman Seth is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Leeds University Business School and an honorary Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). He had previously been a Research Officer and a Senior Research Officer at OPHI between 2010 and 2015. He is primarily interested in Development Economics with a particular emphasis on measurement methodologies and policy-oriented applications. Previously, he has served as consultants to the Regional Bureau of Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to the Development Research Groups at the World Bank, and to the Asian Development Bank. He has co-authored a book on income poverty measurement with the World Bank and a book on multidimensional poverty with OPHI colleagues.