Contructing A Broader Measure Of Welfare Incorporating The Access To Public Goods

This paper attempts to construct a broader measure of welfare that takes in account the access people have to some public goods. If the data on household access to public goods and private assets is assumed to be the result of a maximization problem, a latent indirect utility level may be estimated by some factor model. In this paper the individual measure of welfare is constructed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in the ownership of private assets and the existence of public goods in the neighborhood the agent lives in. The resulting welfare distributions are used in different analysis: Calculate the treatment effect of having access to certain public goods; investigate the effects of public goods in poverty and inequality alleviation; development of an algorithm to locate public goods in order to maximize some social welfare function.