Satya R. Chakravarty – författare

“An indispensable reference for all researchers interested in the measurement of social  welfare. . .”

—François Bourguignon, Emeritus Professor at Paris School of Economics, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank.

“. . .a detailed, insightful, and pedagogical presentation of the theoretical grounds of multidimensional well-being, inequality, and poverty measurement. Any student, researcher, and practitioner interested in the multidimensional approach should begin their journey into such a fascinating theme with this wonderful book.”

—François Maniquet, Professor, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.

A Review of the Multidimensional Approaches to the Measurement of Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty

Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach offers a comprehensive approach to the measurement of well-being that includes characteristics such as income, health, literacy, and housing. The author presents a systematic comparison of the alternative approaches to the measurement of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability. The text contains real-life applications of some multidimensional aggregations (most of which have been designed by international organizations such as the United Nations

Development Program and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) that help to judge the performance of a country in the various dimensions of well-being.

The text offers an evaluation of how well a society is doing with respect to achievements of all the individuals in the dimensions considered and clearly investigates how achievements in the dimensions can be evaluated from different perspectives. The author includes a detailed scrutiny of alternative techniques for setting weights to individual dimensional metrics and offers an extensive analysis into both the descriptive and welfare theoretical approaches to the concerned multi-attribute measurement and related issues. This important resource:

• Contains a synthesis of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability analysis

• Examines aggregations of achievement levels in the concerned dimensions of well-being from various standpoints

• Shows how to measure poverty using panel data instead of restricting attention to a single period and when we have imprecise information on dimensional achievements

• Argues that multidimensional analysis is intrinsically different from marginal distributions-based analysis

Written for students, teachers, researchers, and scholars, Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach puts the focus on various approaches to the measurementof the many aspects of well-being and quality of life.

Satya R. Chakravarty is a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. He is an Editor of Social Choice and Welfare and a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Economic Inequality.

“An indispensable reference for all researchers interested in the measurement of social  welfare. . .”

—François Bourguignon, Emeritus Professor at Paris School of Economics, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank.

“. . .a detailed, insightful, and pedagogical presentation of the theoretical grounds of multidimensional well-being, inequality, and poverty measurement. Any student, researcher, and practitioner interested in the multidimensional approach should begin their journey into such a fascinating theme with this wonderful book.”

—François Maniquet, Professor, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.

A Review of the Multidimensional Approaches to the Measurement of Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty

Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach offers a comprehensive approach to the measurement of well-being that includes characteristics such as income, health, literacy, and housing. The author presents a systematic comparison of the alternative approaches to the measurement of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability. The text contains real-life applications of some multidimensional aggregations (most of which have been designed by international organizations such as the United Nations

Development Program and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) that help to judge the performance of a country in the various dimensions of well-being.

The text offers an evaluation of how well a society is doing with respect to achievements of all the individuals in the dimensions considered and clearly investigates how achievements in the dimensions can be evaluated from different perspectives. The author includes a detailed scrutiny of alternative techniques for setting weights to individual dimensional metrics and offers an extensive analysis into both the descriptive and welfare theoretical approaches to the concerned multi-attribute measurement and related issues. This important resource:

• Contains a synthesis of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability analysis

• Examines aggregations of achievement levels in the concerned dimensions of well-being from various standpoints

• Shows how to measure poverty using panel data instead of restricting attention to a single period and when we have imprecise information on dimensional achievements

• Argues that multidimensional analysis is intrinsically different from marginal distributions-based analysis

Written for students, teachers, researchers, and scholars, Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach puts the focus on various approaches to the measurementof the many aspects of well-being and quality of life.

Satya R. Chakravarty is a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. He is an Editor of Social Choice and Welfare and a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Economic Inequality.

This monograph initially offers a systematic treatment of the theory and methodology of alternative notions of income polarization and related issues. It then goes on to analyze social polarization, ordinal polarization, and the relations between inequality polarization, fractionalization and likelihood of conflicts. Axiomatic approaches to the measurement of polarization from different perspectives are analyzed rigorously. In order to understand the difference between inequality and polarization, a discussion on income inequality is also included.

This book honors the memory of Tony Atkinson, who made significant contributions to the rigorous study of income inequality, poverty, and redistribution. These essays presented, covering a span of over 30 years of research and scholarship, have been at the forefront of distributional analysis, and many of them are of prime importance for contemporary developments in the real-valued measurement of poverty and inequality, with particular reference to the concepts of fuzzy poverty assessment, vulnerability, heterogeneity/multidimensionality, unit consistency, sub-group decomposability, and dominance criteria. While all of these articles have been previously published—singly or with co-authorship—in a number of professional journals or distinguished edited volumes, this book is greatly enriched by a substantial introductions by the authors, which place the contributions in context, highlights their inter-connectedness, and relates them to the work of Tony Atkinson and other scholars. This book is of intrinsic value to welfare analysts, as well as being a tribute to a very great scholar by a fellow economist.