Too young to die: Deprivation measures combining poverty and premature mortality
Most measures of deprivation concentrate on deprivation among the living population and, thus, ignore premature mortality. This omission leads to a severe bias in the evaluation of deprivation. We propose three different measures that combine information on poverty and premature mortality of a population in a meaningful manner. These indices are consistent and satisfy a number of desirable properties unmet by all other measures combining early mortality and poverty. Moreover, these measures are readily computable with available data and easily interpretable. We show that omitting premature mortality leads to an underestimation of total deprivation in 2014 of at least 30% at the world level. We also show that the ranking in terms of deprivation of countries is substantially changed with our measures, and that our understanding of the evolution of countries’ deprivation may be reversed when taking premature mortality into account.
Date: 24 January 2020, 13:00 (Friday, 1st week, Hilary 2020)
Venue: Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road OX1 3TB
Venue Details: Seminar Room 2
Speaker: Dr Benoît Decerf (University of Namur)
Organising department: Oxford Department of International Development
Organiser contact email address: ophi@qeh.ox.ac.uk
Part of: OPHI Seminar Series
Topics:
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Emeline Marcelin