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Inequality and Welfare: Is Europe Special? 517<br />

Dimension<br />

Individual well-being<br />

Aggregator for<br />

each dimension<br />

Collective well-being<br />

Figure 12.1 The two routes for aggregating welfares in a multidimensional<br />

setting.<br />

some are technical, others are more normative. Consequently, the robustness of<br />

the country ranking according to these indicators is all but warranted.<br />

12.2.3 Aggregating Welfare<br />

There are basically two routes to construct such indices. The basic information<br />

structure can be illustrated by the following matrix where the profiles of individuals<br />

are represented in rows according to various dimensions that are featured<br />

in columns. The typical element of this matrix is the allocation of individual i<br />

in good j, x j<br />

i :<br />

Dimensions<br />

⎛ ⎞<br />

Individuals ⎝ x<br />

j ⎠<br />

i<br />

The HDI or IHDI illustrates (see Figure 12.1) a first alternative where each<br />

dimension is first aggregated into a specific aggregator (for instance the GNI<br />

per capita for the income dimension) and then we have to solve the problem<br />

of how to add carrots and tomatoes. It is important to recognize that with this<br />

first route, collective welfare does not aggregate individual welfare, which is<br />

not defined as such. This way of proceeding bypasses computing individual<br />

welfare and hence it ignores the correlation between the different distributions.<br />

The other route is deeply imbedded in the social choice literature which<br />

deals with the principles of aggregation of preference. The main concept is

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