Welfare Comparisons with Multidimensional Well-Being Indicators: An Indian Illustration

This paper attempts a welfare comparison of population where only ordinal information is available at the micro level in terms of multi-dimensional discrete well-being indicators. This does not involve any assumption either regarding strength of preference for each dimension or regarding the desirability of changes between levels within or across dimensions or the complementarities/substitutability between the dimensions. To carry out such a comparison, the concept of multidimensional first order dominance that enables us to make comparison across time and between populations based on a series of binary or multi-levelled ordinal welfare indicators is adopted. This concept is applied to the data on household basic amenities obtained in the NSSO rounds and comparison is made across Indian states. Such a comparison offers a contrast to the welfare comparison made in terms of the deprivation prevalence across dimensions as well as its temporal changes.