Weight and welfare of Australians, 1890-1940

Views differ on whether living standards in Australia improved between 1890 and 1940. The pessimists, relying principally on product and incomes measures, argue that living standards stagnated; the optimists, using augmented measures of well-being, argue that living standards may have improved. This paper contributes to this debate between the pessimists and optimists by using alternative measures of living standards, namely the height and body mass index (BMI) of male Australian army recruits of World Wars I and II. The nature and usefulness of these measures is examined. The major findings are that the height data indicate an unequivocal improvement in living standards in the period under consideration. The BMI data tend to support a similar conclusion, but the results are ambiguous and there are difficulties in using them alone to determine exactly what happened to living standards.     

Spatial Comparisons of Poverty and Inequality in Living Standards in Malawi

The paper looks at poverty and inequality across areas in Malawi. The focus is on both monetary (consumption) and non‐monetary (health and education) dimensions of well‐being. Stochastic poverty dominance tests show that rural areas are poorer in the three dimensions regardless of poverty line chosen. Stochastic inequality dominance tests find that the north and south dominate the centre in health inequality, and there is no dominance between the north and south. With respect to education inequality, dominance is declared for the south‐centre pair only. A subgroup decomposition analysis finds that the south contributes the most to consumption and education poverty, while the centre is the largest contributor to health poverty. We establish that within‐area inequalities (vertical inequalities) rather than between‐area inequalities (horizontal inequalities) are the major driver of consumption, health and education inequality in Malawi.