A Dominance Approach to Well-Being Inequality across Countries

This paper proposes a dominance approach to study well-being inequality across countries at the world level. We consider a class of well-being indices based on the three attributes considered in the HDI (Human Development Index). Indices are required to satisfy preference for egalitarian marginal distributions of income, health and education, inclination for less correlation between attributes and priority to poor countries for allocating funds to improve health and education. We exhibit sufficient conditions which are easy to implement to check dominance over the defined class of well-being indices.