Quality of Life and Poverty: Measurement and Comparability

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the correspondence among the rankings of the Spanish regions according to different measures of monetary poverty and quality of life, in 2012. To do that, the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient is used. Different aggregation methods are applied to calculate the selected measures of poverty and quality of life. The monetary poverty measures aggregate the income gaps, while the quality of life measures aggregate a set of indicators dealing with ten different domains. In both cases, among other traditional aggregation procedures, the exponential mean is used because its properties are especially adequate in these contexts.