Eliciting, Applying And Exploring Multidimensional Welfare Weights: Evidence From The Field

• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Lucio Esposito,Enrica Chiappero‐Martinetti
• Date: 01 November 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.12407

© 2019 Internation al Association for Re search in Inco me and Wealth

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ELICITING, APPLYING AND EXPLORING MULTIDIMENSIONAL

WELFARE WEIGHTS: EVIDENCE FROM THE FIELD*

by Lucio Esposito*

School of Inter national Develop ment,University of E ast Anglia

AND

Enrica chiappEro-MartinEtti

Departme nt of Political and Soci al Sciences,Unive rsity of Pavia

By combining primary data on dimension importance collected in the field from three different samples

and nationally representative survey data from the Dominican Republic, we offer a twofold contribu-

tion. The first one comes from an unincentivized questionnaire experiment, where the significance of

the treatment effect shows that life domains are valued differently in a poverty vs a well-being frame-

work. This poses important questions on the anatomy of dimension importance and on the use of

weights in empirical analyses, and opens the door to what we call a “concordance paradox” related to

the very essence of the constructs of poverty and well-being. As a second contribution, we employ the

sets of weights collected in the field to assess the trend of multidimensional poverty and well-being in

the country. We find that the picking one set of weights or another is not a trivial choice, as they lead to

opposite assessment results.

JEL Codes: I32, I31, D63, O12

Keywords: multidimensional poverty, between-subject design, fieldwork, weighting schemes, well-being

1. introduction

Researchers from a variety of disciplines in the social and medical sciences are

increasingly interested in the multidimensional evaluation of human achievements

or deprivations, the underlying phenomenon of interest including poverty, well-be-

ing, capabilities, quality of life, health, literacy, etc.—see Esposito et al. (2011),

Massey et al. (2013), Hick (2014), Alkire et al. (2015), Donohue and Biggs (2015),

Feeny and McDonald (2016) and Schang et al. (2016). The array of aspects of

human life being taken into examination is extremely wide; for example, the inter-

disciplinary review by Linton et al. (2016), which focuses on the concept of well-

being and does not cover age-specific or condition-specific measures, identifies as

many as 196 dimensions being used in the literature.

*The authors thank Sarah Tustin, the editors, two anonymous referees and the participants of the

IARIW-BOK conference for valuable comments which led to substantial improvement of our work. We

would also like to thank the University of Pavia for funding the primary data collection this paper is

based on.

*Correspondence to. Lucio Esposito, School of International Development, University of East

Anglia, NR4 7TJ, Norwich, UK (lucio.esposito@uea.ac.uk).

Review of Inc ome and Wealth

Series 65, Numb er S1, November 2019

DOI : 10.1111 /roi w.124 07

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Review of Income and Wealth, Series 65, Number S1, November 2019

S205

© 2019 Internation al Association for Re search in Inco me and Wealth

While multidimensional evaluation enabled researchers to unveil aspects of

poverty and well-being neglected by unidimensional monetary evaluation (Victor

et al., 2014, Alkire et al., 2015, Trani et al., 2016), it also confronted them with

increased technical complexity and possibly greater scope for arbitrariness—with

regard to, for example, desirable functional forms, aggregation procedures, the

choice of the relevant dimensions and of the weights to be attached to them, etc.

In the past decade, a number of contributions have significantly increased our

command over the technical difficulties behind a multidimensional approach to

poverty and well-being measurement.1 While this body of work has brought us a

long way from the initial contributions of Morris (1979), Atkinson and Bourguignon

(1982), UNDP (1990) and Dasgupta and Weale (1992), the field of multidimen-

sional evaluation still presents a number of challenges and hosts heated debates—

e.g. the “single index approach” vs “dashboard approach” debate, see Alkire and

Foster (2011b), Ferreira (2011), Ravallion (2011) and Ferreira and Lugo (2013).

In this paper, we focus on the issue of dimension weights. We offer a two-

fold contribution on this issue by combining nationally representative survey data

from the Dominican Republic and primary data on dimension importance person-

ally collected in the field by one of the authors—the primary data amounting to

1,402 observations and comprising a university student sample, a sample of local

“development experts” and a sample of respondents who are more heterogeneous

in terms of socio-economic characteristics. Our first offer stems from the follow-

ing consideration. While it often occurs that a certain dimension (e.g. education)

features in the measurement of different constructs (e.g. “poverty,” “well-being,”

“development,” etc.), there is no evidence in the literature as to whether the public

would attach different importance to the dimension depending on which construct

it refers to—i.e. depending on whether it is intended “as a dimension of poverty”

or “as a dimension of well-being.” We address this issue by running a question-

naire experiment with our university student sample (N = 1,083). Random allo-

cation of a “poverty” and a “well-being” questionnaire versions does produce a

significant difference in the importance attached to the dimensions we consider in

our study (education, health, housing and personal safety). This result indicates

that people may value dimensions differently depending on the construct under

consideration and therefore a blanket set of weights to be applied for any multi-

dimensional evaluation may be inappropriate. In addition, our finding raises what

we call a “concordance paradox” which has meaningful implications for the con-

ceptualization of the notions of poverty and well-being, as will be discussed in the

paper. The second offer of our paper relates to the debate as to whether the adop-

tion of different weighting schemes produces qualitative differences in multidimen-

sional evaluations or not. We estimate multidimensional poverty and well-being in

the Dominican Republic using national household surveys from 1997 and 2007,

and employing equal weights as well as the sets of weights elicited from our three

1See, inter alia, Tsui (2002), Bourguignon and Chakravarty (2003), Duclos et al. (2006), Kakwani

and Silber (2008), Chakravarty et al. (2018), Alkire and Santos (2010) and Alkire and Foster (2011a,

2011b), Belhadj and Limam (2012), Pattanaik et al. (2012), Ravallion (2012), Bossert et al. (2013),

Decancq and Lugo (2013), Seth (2013), Permanyer (2014), Yalonetzky (2014) and Maasoumi and

Racine (2016). For recent contributions discussing the main theoretical and empirical aspects of multi-

dimensional poverty see, respectively, Chakravarty and Chattopadhyay (2008) and Guio (2018).