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Valuation and evaluation: measuring the quality of life and evaluating policy

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  • Dasgupta, Partha

Abstract

This paper is about measuring social well-being and evaluating policy. Part I is concerned with the links between the two, while Parts II and III, respectively, are devoted to the development of appropriate methods of measuring and evaluating. In Part II (Sections 4-7) I identify a minimal set of indices for spanning a general conception of social well-being. The analysis is motivated by the frequent need to make welfare comparisons across time and communities. A distinction is drawn between current well-being and sustainable well-being. Measuring current well-being is the subject of discussion in Sections 5-6. It is argued that a set of five indices, consisting of private consumption per head, life expectancy at birth, literacy, and indices of civil and political liberties, taken together, are a reasonable approximation for the purpose in hand. Indices of the quality of life currently in use, such as UNDP's Human Development Index, are cardinal measures. Since indices of civil and political liberties are only ordinal, aggregate measures of social well-being should be required to be ordinal. In this connection, the Borda index suggests itself. In Section 6 the Borda index is put to work on data on what were 46 of the poorest countries in the early 1980s. Interestingly, of the component indices, the ranking of countries in the sample in terms of life expectancy at birth is found to be the most highly correlated with the countries' Borda ranking. Even more interestingly, the ranking of countries in terms of gross national product (GNP) per head is almost as highly correlated. There can be little doubt that this finding is an empirical happenstance. But it may not be an uncommon happenstance. If this were so, GNP per head could reasonably continue to be used as a summary measure of social well-being, even though it has no theoretical claims to be one. It is widely thought that net national product (NNP) per head measures the economic component of sustainable wel

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  • Dasgupta, Partha, 2000. "Valuation and evaluation: measuring the quality of life and evaluating policy," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 6657, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:6657
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    2. Ligía Noronha, 2001. "Designing tools to track health and well‐being in mining regions of India," Natural Resources Forum, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 25(1), pages 53-65, February.
    3. Di Tella, Rafael & MacCulloch, Robert, 2008. "Gross national happiness as an answer to the Easterlin Paradox?," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(1), pages 22-42, April.
    4. Rafael di Tella & Ernesto Schargrodsky, 2009. "Happiness, Ideology and Crime in Argentine Cities," Research Department Publications 4645, Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department.
    5. Enrico Ivaldi & Guido Bonatti & Riccardo Soliani, 2016. "The Construction of a Synthetic Index Comparing Multidimensional Well-Being in the European Union," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 125(2), pages 397-430, January.
    6. Jacobsen, Ben & Mallawaarachchi, Thilak, 2002. "Issues in the Implementation of Nonpoint Source Pollution Mitigation: A Case Study of Potential Expansion of the Sugar Industry in North Queensland," 2002 Conference (46th), February 13-15, 2002, Canberra, Australia 125112, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.
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    8. Panagiotis Artelaris & George Mavrommatis, 2021. "The role of economic and cultural changes in the rise of far‐right in Greece: A regional analysis," Regional Science Policy & Practice, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 13(2), pages 353-369, April.
    9. Sibylle Gerstl & Justin Sauter & Joseph Kasanda & Alfred Kinzelbach, 2013. "Who Can Afford Health Care? Evaluating the Socio-Economic Conditions and the Ability to Contribute to Health Care in a Post-Conflict Area in DR Congo," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(10), pages 1-1, October.
    10. Enrico Ivaldi & Guido Bonatti & Riccardo Soliani, 2014. "Composite Index for Quality of Life in Italian Cities: An Application to URBES Indicators," Review of Economics & Finance, Better Advances Press, Canada, vol. 4, pages 18-32, November.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Externalities; market imperfections; growth; multiple equilibria; sunspot equilibrium;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • P5 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Comparative Economic Systems
    • Q2 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Renewable Resources and Conservation
    • O2 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Development Planning and Policy

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