School of Economics

SOE Assistant Professor Angela Daley and colleagues recently published research on comparing economic well-being in the International Review of Applied Economics. They focused on the challenges of comparing economic well-being across countries and time using a common equivalence scale to reflect economies of scale in household consumption. By revealing differences in household expenditure patterns across countries and time, Dr. Angela Daley and colleagues find that the widely-used ‘square root of household size’ equivalence scale understates economies of scale, and thus overstates the poverty experienced by larger versus smaller families. They conclude that country- and/or time-specific scales should be used when comparing economic well-being across these dimensions. In the context of COVID-19, these results suggest that changes in the way people spend money (e.g. home-cooked versus restaurant meals) affect economies of scale, and should be considered when choosing an equivalence scale to compare economic well-being. For more information about their research, click here to access the journal article.