Normative Indicators Combining Poverty and Mortality : A Survey

This paper surveys the small branch of welfare economics that studies indicators combiningpoverty and mortality. The paper distinguishes two reasons for constructing such indicators. The first reason is toperform multidimensional well-being comparisons. For this purpose, mortality has (negative) intrinsic value. The keyquestion relates to the trade-off that the indicator makes between poverty and mortality, that is, between the qualityand quantity of life. A lifecycle utility approach suggests expressing this trade-off as the number of years spent inpoverty that is deemed equivalent to one year lost to mortality. The second reason is to investigate theinstrumental role that selective mortality—the fact that the poor tend to die earlier—has on the evolution of povertymeasures. Then, the key question is how to define the counterfactual situation against which the instrumentalimpact of mortality is assessed.