DECOMPOSING WELL-BEING INDICATORS USING DISTRIBUTIONAL DATA

This paper makes two principal contributions: first, we propose a method for representing well-being aggregates and estimating population subgroup decompositions when data is available on population distributions across subgroups; second, we analyze the Quality of Life (QOL) of 'poor' and 'non-poor' population segments of 86 countries for the years 1980s and 1990s. The three major findings of this paper are as follows: First, nearly every well-being indicator declines as poor's population share increases; second, evidence of a significant difference in the QOL-poor's population share relationship between Asian and nonAsian countries is present for only few QOL indicators. In other words, the tendency for QOL to decline with increasing poor's population share is common to the Asian and nonAsian countries; third, women suffer a double QOL disadvantage in areas of health and education as the poor's share of population increases. This is due to the existence of relatively wider gender gaps in the well-being indicators among poor populations in Asia and elsewhere.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Measuring the Impact of Globalization on the Well-being of the Poor: Methodology and an Application to Africa

Whereas a large number of empirical studies have been devoted to analyzing the relationship between measures of income and globalization (defined by openness to international trade), much less attention has been paid to the analysis of well-being for the various subgroups of population and their causal associations with globalization. To address this gap in the literature, this paper first analyzes the quality of life (QOL) of 'poor' and 'non-poor' population segments of 40 African countries over a period of 1980-2000, and then examines their causal association with openness to trade. In order to understand the impact of openness to trade on the well-being of poor, we assume the causal chain Openness_ Income_ Poverty_ Well-being of poor and empirically examine link by link for Africa. The first link of the chain is from openness to growth. The second link in the causal chain from openness to well-being is the interrelationship between growth and poverty. The third link of the chain is from reduction in poverty to improvement of well-being. The major findings of this paper are: First, nearly every well-being indicator declines as the poor's population share increases; second, the tendency for QOL to decline with increasing poor's population share is common to the African and non-African countries; third, women suffer a double QOL disadvantage in areas of health and education as the poor's share of population increases; and fourth, globalization has improved incomes of African countries, however, there is a no significant decline in poverty and improvement in well-being of the poor over the period. We discuss the key challenges faces by African countries to beneficially engage in the world economy.International Relations/Trade,

DISTRIBUTION OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, CHILD LABOR AND POVERTY IN INDIA

This paper contributes to the growing debate on regional economic inequality and polarization in India. The specific objectives of this paper are to: (1) analyze regional development disparities amongst various states in India to determine if they are on a convergent course; (2) analyze the evolution of regional inequalities amongst states with respect to a number of socioeconomic indicators and factors that have been suggested to affect the incidence of child labor; (3) investigate and test empirically whether polarization is taking place in Indian states; and (4) investigate whether regional indices of human development and child labor incidence follow similar patterns. Using a consistent data series and applying a number of recently developed measures, trends over the decades of 1961-1991 are documented. The results show that there is little evidence to suggest that any convergence of either the Ò or ã type is taking place amongst the states in India and while there has been no significant decrease in regional inequalities relating to human development, inequalities relating to child labor incidence have increased.Labor and Human Capital,

A survey of fuzzy rule-based image segmentation techniques

This paper describes the various fuzzy rule based techniques for image segmentation. Fuzzy rule based segmentation techniques can incorporate domain expert knowledge and manipulate numerical as well as linguistic data. They are also capable of drawing partial inference using fuzzy IF-THEN rules. For these reasons they have been extensively applied in medical imaging. But these rules are application domain specific and it is very difficult to define the rules either manually or automatically so that the segementation can be achieved successfully

Measuring the Quality of Life across Countries: A Sensitivity Analysis of Well-being Indices

quality of life, domains of quality of life, Borda rule, principal components analysis, well-being indices