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Estimating the absolute wealth of households

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  • The estimation of the economic status of individuals and their households is central to much work in epidemiology and the social sciences. Wealth is a key determinant of health and social achievement and an indicator of well-being in its own right. For this reason, the development and testing of novel measures of economic status is of interest. There is lively debate over the relative merits of the competing methods used to assess and compare the relative or absolute wealth of individuals and households. Although several methods to estimate absolute household wealth have already been developed or proposed, each has its limitations, including sensitivity to the sample of countries as well as to the country selected as baseline. Most also rely on arbitrary wealth indicators, cut-offs to anchor comparisons and/or a common set of assets. Such approaches often exclude countries using different assets in surveys, ignore assets that may be important in a specific country setting and assume that an asset in one country provides the same measure of wealth as it does in another country. In an attempt to address these limitations, we have developed a method for estimating the absolute household wealth per capita – called the absolute wealth estimate – in units that permit meaningful comparisons across countries and years. We used the method to evaluate the prevalence of poverty and indicators of nutritional status and compared these results to common benchmarks.
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  • Hruschka, D. J., Gerkey, D., & Hadley, C. (2015). Estimating the absolute wealth of households. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 93(7), 483-490. doi:10.2471/BLT.14.147082
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  • 93
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  • 7
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  • DJH acknowledges support from the United States National Science Foundation Grant BCS-1150813, funded by the Programs in Cultural Anthropology, Social Psychology Program and Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences. DG was supported by a grant from the United States National Science Foundation to the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (DBI-1052875).
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