Paradox and Perception: Measuring Quality of Life in Latin America

2 Objective and Subjective Deprivation

Deprivation is arguably the main social concern in the world. Just to mention one example, the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of the United Nations is halving poverty from 1990 to 2015. Although usually associated with income poverty, it has long been recognized that the concept of deprivation has multiple dimensions, including the lack of assets and opportunities and the own perception of low standard of living and social exclusion. Research on multidimensional deprivation in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has been less systematic than in the developed world, in part due to lack of relevant data. Although all national household surveys in the region include questions on income, and many also on assets, it is difficult to provide a consistent picture for the region due to substantial differences in the questionnaires. In addition, questions on perceptions and self-assessment of living standards are not common in the LAC national household surveys. This chapter makes extensive use of the Gallup World Poll, which may help to overcome those difficulties. This survey provides rich data on a wide range of issues in over 130 countries, 23 of them from LAC. The Gallup Poll has two main advantages over national household surveys: it includes a larger and much richer set of questions on quality of life and perceptions, and the survey design and questionnaires are similar across countries. This chapter is aimed at providing evidence on the multiple dimensions of deprivation in LAC by exploiting the Gallup World Poll combined with the national Objective and Subjective Deprivation leonardo gasparini, walter sosa escudero, mariana marchionni, and sergio olivieri 2 22 objective and subjective deprivation 23 household surveys. In particular, we estimate levels and patterns of income, multidimensional non-monetary, and subjective deprivation for all countries in the region based on Gallup data, and compare the results with those from household surveys. Income in the Gallup World Poll The main source of information for this chapter is the 2006 wave of the Gallup World Poll, an ambitious survey conducted in more than 130 countries worldwide since that year, which provides the widest coverage to date on reported wellbeing . The country samples are nationally representative. The interviews are conducted by telephone in countries with land line coverage of 80 percent or more of the population, and in person in the rest of countries. The LAC countries fall into the latter category. Household members were selected randomly (from those 15 years or older) to avoid bias coming from interviewing only the first available household member. Because the survey has the same questionnaire in all the countries, it provides a unique opportunity to perform cross-country comparisons.1 The Gallup World Poll is particularly rich in self-reported measures of quality of life, opinions and perceptions. It also includes basic questions on demographics, education, and employment, and a question on household income. The 2006 wave of the Gallup World Poll surveyed 141,739 persons, 21,200 of them from the 23 LAC countries included in the survey (all the 17 Latin countries plus the main nations in the Caribbean according to their population: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Trinidad and Tobago). The country samples have around 1,000 observations, except in Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Trinidad and Tobago, where around 500 observations were collected. The basic socio-demographic statistics (age, gender composition, number of children and rural-urban composition) from the Gallup Poll seem to be consistent with those from the household surveys collected by the National Statistical Offices (NSO) of the LAC countries.2 However, in a few countries, there are important discrepancies, which cast some doubts on the national representativeness of the poll, as it will be discussed later in this chapter. In spite of its drawbacks and limitations, income adjusted by demographics is widely used as a proxy for individual well-being.3 In most countries poverty and 1. Deaton (2007) is one of the first studies using the 2006 Gallup Poll. 2. For this purpose the datasets processed at the Centro de Estudios Distributivos Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS 2007) were used. These datasets are part of the Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean project (SEDLAC project) carried out by CEDLAS and the World Bank’s LAC Poverty Group (LCSPP), with the help of the Program for the Improvement of Surveys and the Measurement of Living Conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean (MECOVI). For more information see www.cedlas.org. 3. See Deaton (1997) and...