We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous univariate approaches, we consider income and life expectancy jointly and estimate their bivariate global distribution for 137 countries during 1970 - 2000. We reach several conclusions: the global joint distribution has evolved from a bimodal into a unimodal one, the evolution of the health distribution has preceded that of income, global inequality and poverty has decreased over time and the evolution of the global distribution has been welfare improving. Our decomposition of overall welfare indicates that global inequality would be underestimated if within-country inequality is not taken into account. Moreover, global inequality and poverty would be substantially underestimated if the dependence between the income and health distributions is ignored.
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Paper provided by CESifo Group Munich in its series CESifo Working Paper Series with number
CESifo Working Paper No. 2367.
Find related papers by JEL classification: O10 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - General O15 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration O57 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Comparative Studies of Countries
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David Cutler & Angus Deaton & Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2005.
"The Determinants of Mortality,"
Working Papers
164, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Research Program in Development Studies..
[Downloadable!]
David Cutler & Angus Deaton & Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2005.
"The Determinants of Mortality,"
Working Papers
235, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing..
[Downloadable!]
David M. Cutler & Angus S. Deaton & Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2006.
"The Determinants of Mortality,"
NBER Working Papers
11963, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)