IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/unu/wpaper/rp2004-24.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Income-based Measures of Average Well-being

Author

Listed:
  • Steve Dowrick

Abstract

International comparisons of average national incomes omit important information about leisure, home production, health, etc. They are also bedevilled by index number problems. This paper suggests ways of combining working hours and life-expectancy with income comparisons, and shows that the fixed-price indexes of real income, such as those in the Penn World Table, substantially understate the income gaps between the poorest and richest countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Steve Dowrick, 2004. "Income-based Measures of Average Well-being," WIDER Working Paper Series RP2004-24, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    • Handle: RePEc:unu:wpaper:rp2004-24
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/rp2004-024.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Samuelson, Paul A, 1984. "Second Thoughts on Analytical Income Comparisons," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 94(374), pages 267-278, June.
    2. Nancy Folbre & Julie A. Nelson, 2000. "For Love or Money--Or Both?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 14(4), pages 123-140, Fall.
    3. Eisner, Robert, 1988. "Extended Accounts for National Income and Product," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 26(4), pages 1611-1684, December.
    4. Dowrick, Steve & Dunlop, Yvonne & Quiggin, John, 2003. "Social indicators and comparisons of living standards," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(2), pages 501-529, April.
    5. Jerry Hausman, 2003. "Sources of Bias and Solutions to Bias in the Consumer Price Index," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 17(1), pages 23-44, Winter.
    6. Charles L. Schultze, 2003. "The Consumer Price Index: Conceptual Issues and Practical Suggestions," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 17(1), pages 3-22, Winter.
    7. Hill, Robert J., 2000. "Measuring substitution bias in international comparisons based on additive purchasing power parity methods," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 44(1), pages 145-162, January.
    8. Hal R. Varian, 1983. "Non-parametric Tests of Consumer Behaviour," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 50(1), pages 99-110.
    9. Dowrick, Steve & Quiggin, John, 1994. "International Comparisons of Living Standards and Tastes: A Revealed-Preference Analysis," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(1), pages 332-341, March.
    10. Bela Balassa, 1964. "The Purchasing-Power Parity Doctrine: A Reappraisal," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 72(6), pages 584-584.
    11. Dowrick, Steve & Quiggin, John, 1997. "True Measures of GDP and Convergence," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 87(1), pages 41-64, March.
    12. Robert Summers & Alan Heston, 1991. "The Penn World Table (Mark 5): An Expanded Set of International Comparisons, 1950–1988," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 106(2), pages 327-368.
    13. Steve Dowrick & Muhammad Akmal, 2005. "Contradictory Trends In Global Income Inequality: A Tale Of Two Biases," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 51(2), pages 201-229, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Paul Johnson & Chris Papageorgiou, 2020. "What Remains of Cross-Country Convergence?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 58(1), pages 129-175, March.
    2. Cifuentes, Myriam Patricia & Doogan, Nathan J. & Fernandez, Soledad A. & Seiber, Eric E., 2016. "Factors shaping Americans’ objective well-being: A systems science approach with network analysis," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 38(6), pages 1018-1039.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Robert Hill & Daniel Melser, 2015. "Benchmark averaging and the measurement of changes in international income inequality," Review of World Economics (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv), Springer;Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Kiel Institute for the World Economy), vol. 151(4), pages 767-801, November.
    2. Eran Binenbaum & Zhang Wei, 2005. "Improved Measurement of National Income Using Ricardian Trade Model," School of Economics and Public Policy Working Papers 2005-10, University of Adelaide, School of Economics and Public Policy.
    3. Dowrick, Steve & Dunlop, Yvonne & Quiggin, John, 2003. "Social indicators and comparisons of living standards," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(2), pages 501-529, April.
    4. Hassan, Fadi, 2016. "The price of development: The Penn–Balassa–Samuelson effect revisited," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 291-309.
    5. Steve Dowrick, 2002. "G-20 Comparisons of Incomes and Prices: What can we Learn from the International Comparison Program?," RBA Annual Conference Volume (Discontinued), in: David Gruen & Terry O'Brien & Jeremy Lawson (ed.),Globalisation, Living Standards and Inequality: Recent Progress and Continuing Challenges, Reserve Bank of Australia.
    6. J. Peter Neary, 2004. "Rationalizing the Penn World Table: True Multilateral Indices for International Comparisons of Real Income," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(5), pages 1411-1428, December.
    7. Prados de la Escosura, Leandro, 2000. "International Comparisons of Real Product, 1820-1990: An Alternative Data Set," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 1-41, January.
    8. Almås, Ingvild & Sørensen, Erik Ø., 2012. "Global Income Inequality and Cost-of-Living Adjustment: The Geary–Allen World Accounts," Discussion Paper Series in Economics 20/2012, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics.
    9. Hai Long Vo & Duc Hong Vo, 2023. "The purchasing power parity and exchange‐rate economics half a century on," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(2), pages 446-479, April.
    10. Marshall Reinsdorf & Jack E. Triplett, 2009. "A Review of Reviews: Ninety Years of Professional Thinking About the Consumer Price Index," NBER Chapters, in: Price Index Concepts and Measurement, pages 17-83, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Robert J. Hill & T. Peter Hill, 2007. "Regionalization and its Implications for Price Index Construction: The Case of the International Comparisons Program," Discussion Papers 2007-28, School of Economics, The University of New South Wales.
    12. Long Hai Vo, 2023. "Understanding International Price and Consumption Disparities," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 69(2), pages 443-473, June.
    13. Caselli, Francesco, 2005. "Accounting for Cross-Country Income Differences," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 9, pages 679-741, Elsevier.
    14. Carola Grün & Stephan Klasen, 2003. "Growth, Income Distribution, and Well-Being: Comparisons across Space and Time," CESifo Working Paper Series 837, CESifo.
    15. Amita Majumder & Ranjan Ray, 2020. "National and subnational purchasing power parity: a review," DECISION: Official Journal of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Springer;Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, vol. 47(2), pages 103-124, June.
    16. George Alessandria & Joseph P. Kaboski, 2004. "Violating purchasing power parity," Working Papers 04-19, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    17. Ingvild Almas, 2012. "International Income Inequality: Measuring PPP Bias by Estimating Engel Curves for Food," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(2), pages 1093-1117, April.
    18. Martin Berka & Michael B. Devereux, 2010. "What determines European real exchange rates?," Globalization Institute Working Papers 46, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
    19. Ingvild Almås & Timothy K.M. Beatty & Thomas F. Crossley, 2018. "Lost in Translation: What do Engel Curves Tell us about the Cost of Living?," CESifo Working Paper Series 6886, CESifo.
    20. Achim Schmillen, 2010. "Are Wages Equal Across Sectors of Production? A Panel Data Analysis for Tradable and Non-Tradable Goods," Working Papers 285, Leibniz Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung (Institute for East and Southeast European Studies).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:unu:wpaper:rp2004-24. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Siméon Rapin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/widerfi.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.