Relative versus Absolute: Comparing wealth and poverty impacts on population and health

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) contain a “wealth” of information on the health and demographic conditions of national populations in less developed countries. With the development of the DHS Wealth Index, a new avenue of analysis has been opened up to investigate economic status inequalities beyond those of educational attainment, residence and ethnic group membership. There has been a substantial limitation to this analysis in that the DHS Wealth Index is relative to the situation in each country at the time of the survey. Each index has a mean value of zero and a standard deviation value of one. Thus specific scores and quintile values represent different levels of economic status between surveys and cannot be directly compared.
This paper describes a newly developed methodology for calculating wealth indexes comparable across country and time that allow for direct comparison of levels of economic status. The paper then proceeds to present inequality measures including Lorenz curves, Gini coefficients, and Concentration Indexes for wealth and for a set of demographic and health indicators. Finally, the paper determines the contribution of relative and absolute measures of poverty to progress in these indicators.