Problems Related to Measuring and Interpreting Indicators of the Standard of Living (original) (raw)

Standard of Living in the European Union

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2012

This chapter focuses on the measurement of standard of living and on the factors influencing its level. Specific attention is paid to the indicators of standard of living, and the frequent employment of GDP is discussed and compared with possible alternatives. Household income is also a factor of central importance in determining standard of living, and the chapter assesses this factor in terms of household income distribution, the setting of poverty limits, the measurement of income disparity and the causes and effects of poverty. The situation is monitored in five selected EU countries: the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Social indicators and comparisons of living standards

Journal of Development Economics, 2003

The construction of an international index of standards of living which incorporates social indicators as well as economic output typically involves scaling and weighting procedures which have no foundation in welfare theory. Moreover, elements of GDP which are intermediate inputs into the production of household welfare are often misrepresented as final consumption goods. Revealed preference axioms can be used to make quality-of-life comparisons if it is possible to estimate the representative household's production technology for the social indicators. This method is applied to make comparisons over the components of GDP and life expectancy for a cross-section of 58 countries. Neither GDP rankings, nor the rankings of the Human Development Index, are consistent with the partial ordering of revealed preference. A method of constructing a utility-consistent index incorporating both consumption and life expectancy is suggested.

The Differentiation of Living Standard of Population in the Selected European Countries

2011

The contribution presents the level of living of population in Poland against the background of the selected countries of the European Union. The key to the selection of objects was the year of their accession to the European Union. All the selected countries joined the European Union in 2004. The study covered years 2004 and 2009. It was based on the data collected by the Central Statistical Office of Poland, the Statistical Office of the EU and the OECD. In order to estimate level of living methods of multivariate statistical analysis were applied. On the basis of the synthetic variable, created for the research purposes, a ranking of countries was constructed.

Income and Poverty in Households in Selected European Countries

Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Oeconomica, 2019

Incomes of population and poverty are key elements of the EU cohesion policy which aims at reducing disparities between the levels of development of individual regions. The traditionally appropriate study to evaluate the convergence of the Member States is the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU‑SILC). However, this is not the only source of information on income distribution and social inclusion in the European Union. In this article, the basis for calculations are the results of the fourth European Quality of Life Surveys (EQLS), whose purpose is to measure both objective and subjective indicators of the standard of living of citizens and their households. The aim of the paper is to assess the diversity of distributions of household incomes and the level of income poverty due to the selected socio‑demographic characteristics of the respondent or household in selected European countries in two periods: 2007 and 2016. Countries of the Visegrad Group (Poland...

An Integrated Database to Measure Living Standards

Journal of Official Statistics

This study generates an integrated database to measure living standards in Italy using propensity score matching. We follow the recommendations of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress proposing that income, consumption of market goods and nonmarket activities, and wealth, rather than production, should be evaluated jointly in order to appropriately measure material welfare. Our integrated database is similar in design to the one built for the United States by the Levy Economics Institute to measure the multiple dimensions of well-being. In the United States, as is the case for Italy and most European countries, the state does not maintain a unified database to measure household economic well-being, and data sources about income and employment surveys and other surveys on wealth and the use of time have to be statistically matched. The measure of well-being is therefore the result of a multidimensional evaluation process no longer associated w...

Living Standards in Europe. A Regional View

2015

The European Union aims to be a financial and economic convergent area, yet there still are notable disparities among regions. The goal of this study is to highlight the degree of synchronization of 275 NUTS 2 regions in European countries, between 2002 and 2011, with an emphasis on the impact of the late 2000's economic crisis.In order to focus on the living standard, the chosen variables were the disposable income of the household, the employment rates of adults (20-64 years old) and the regional GDP per inhabitant, which were inserted in a panel data model. Results proved that the regional synchronization is highly influenced by geographical proximity. A notable anomaly concerns capital regions, where, although the regional GDP is higher, disposable income per inhabitant is lower due to higher living costs, not sufficiently compensated by income.

International Comparisons of Living Standards by Equivalent Incomes

Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2009

We propose a measure of living standards for international comparisons. Based on GDP per capita, the measure incorporates corrections for international flows of income, labor, risk of unemployment, healthy life expectancy, household demography and inequalities. The method for comparing populations that differ in some non-income dimension consists of computing the equivalent variation of income that would make each population indifferent between its current situation and a reference situation with respect to the non-income dimension. This is applied to 24 OECD countries. The obtained ranking of countries differs substantially from the GDP ranking.

An approximation to the standard of living index: the colombian case

BORRADORES DE …, 2001

This document seeks to show the main properties of a standard of living index using the theoretical approach of Amartya Sen. We establish the link among concepts such as: welfare, well-being, agency achievement and standard of living. Optimal scaling methodology was fundamental in order to test the properties on the Colombian case. These properties are Monotonicity, No independence of irrelevant alternatives, Concavity, Informativity and Substituibility.

Classification of the European Union Countries with Respect to the Standards of Living

Proceedings 2018

The study evaluates the spatial differentiation in the structure of the standards of living in the European Union countries. Selected measures that represent, in an objective manner, the needs of an average resident of any EU member were analysed in detail. Those included: infant mortality, share of the pre-productive population, unemployment rate, accessibility of information and communications technologies, level of schooling, healthcare accessibility, and crime level. The basic research method used was the Ward's minimum variance procedure. In studied years, the countries with the highest standards of living Sweden. Conversely, the lowest standards of living were found in Bulgaria and Romania.