Introduction to Robustness in Multidimensional Wellbeing Analysis

The multidimensional nature of wellbeing is now the widely accepted approach in frontier research on poverty, inequality and policy analysis. However, signicant challenges and disagreement remain over whether multiple dimensions of wellbeing should be monitored and assessed separately, as in a dashboard approach, or whether these should be evaluated jointly, e.g., by resorting to composite indices. At least two reasons can be used to justify the latter approach in some applications. Firstly, it is not always easy to keep track of trends in each dimension of wellbeing separately when there are too many indicators. Secondly, even when just a few dimensions are involved, we may be interested in computing measures of multidimensional wellbeing that take into account the joint distribution of indicators in the population. Multiple indicators are related, substitutes, and complements. Examples of multidimensional poverty indices include those of Alkire and Foster (2010). This multidimensional approach to wellbeing is not new. Yet it has received vigorous renewed attention in recent years. The renewed attention is also manifest in the ongoing proliferation of multidimensional measures of poverty, inequality, and general wellbeing.