“Too Young to Die”: Deprivation Measures Combining Poverty and Premature Mortality

Abstract

Most measures of deprivation concentrate on deprivation among the living population and, thus, ignore premature mortality. This omission leads to a severe bias in the evaluation of deprivation. We propose two different measures that combine information on poverty and premature mortality of a population. These measures are consistent and satisfy a number of desirable properties unmet by all other measures combining early mortality and poverty. Moreover, one measure is readily computable with available data and easily interpretable. We show that omitting premature mortality leads to an underestimation of total deprivation in 2015 of at least 36 percent at the world level. (JEL C43, I12, I32, N33, N34, O15)