British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2005

26 April 2005

Abstracts

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Dr Patricia Justino

Is Money Enough? An Empirical Analysis of Multidimensional Inequality

The analysis of inequality has recently taken on a central role in the economics literature due to the increase in income inequality observed in many countries. Income is, however, only one aspect of social welfare and it is possible that by focusing exclusively on income inequality we risk ignoring a whole set of important constraints to economic and social development. In this talk, I discuss several approaches to the measurement of multidimensional inequality at the household level. This approach represents a significant departure from traditional analyses of inequality: most existing empirical studies are by and large concerned with inequalities in the distribution of income and other forms of material wealth. However, other variables are also important when characterising the level of social welfare in a given society. These include employment conditions, access to land and other assets, use and access to health, education and other social services, rights of access to political power and legal institutions and security from crime and violence. In this presentation, I will focus on inequalities in income, education, health and political participation outcomes in recent household survey data from Brazil and Vietnam. The results show that economic analyses based solely on the distribution of income variables will not portray fully the degree of socio-economic and political inequalities in those countries. In fact, income inequality estimates may overestimate the extent of inequality in Brazil, as education and other non-monetary welfare attributes appear to be more equally distributed in Brazil than income. On the other hand, they underestimate the degree of inequality in Vietnam, where non-monetary variables are less equally distributed than income. These results indicate that the multidimensional approach to inequality portrays more fully the extent of social, economic and political inequalities in a given society than analyses that concentrate on income inequality alone.

Dr Patricia Justino is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex. Her areas of specialisation are applied microeconomics and quantitative development economics. Her current research analyses monetary and non-monetary dimensions of inequality and their effects on social development and economic growth in developing countries. Other research interests include the impact of social conflict on household welfare, the measurement and modelling of poverty, the role of redistribution on economic development and the impact of trade liberalisation on household income mobility. She is co-founder and co-director of the Leverhulme-funded Households in Conflict Network, a collaborative effort between European researchers to analyse the impact of social conflict on household welfare. She has also been involved in several policy-oriented projects for the World Bank, UNDP, DFID and the Minority Rights Group International.