Assessing inclusive well-being to leave no one behind

The world has continued to seek prosperity by reducing poverty and improving well-being, but it is vital to examine whether this improvement is inclusive. In this paper, we use a quantile-based assessment of trends based on absolute changes that allows robust examination of the inclusiveness of multidimensional well-being changes. We decompose the overall change in inclusive well-being levels into two components: (1) the change in the overall average and (2) the inclusivity premium capturing the extent to which the change in well-being benefits the poorer quantiles. Employing a multidimensional measure of well-being that is closely linked to the flagship global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), we examine the inclusiveness of multidimensional well-being changes for 75 developing countries across six geographic regions. We observe robust improvements in well-being levels for most countries, but only around three-fifths of these countries overall have positive robust inclusivity premiums, and fewer than one-third in sub-Saharan Africa. Our examination of the relationship between inclusivity premium in multidimensional well-being and the World Bank’s shared prosperity premium in monetary space does not yield any monotonic relationship across countries. Furthermore, despite the close link between our inclusive well-being measure and the global MPI, an absolute reduction in the global MPI for a country does not necessarily imply that the corresponding well-being improvement for the country is inclusive. Our proposed framework could play an important role in jointly monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals’ targets of reducing inequality within countries and reducing poverty in multiple dimensions.