The evolution of the standard of living in Spain, 1973-74 to 1980-81

Abstract

In this paper we have investigated the evolution of the standard of living in Spain from 197374 to 1980-81 for a population of about 10 million household and 34 or 37 million persons occupying private housing. The standard of living has been approximated by a private consumption measure, comparisons in real terms have been made possible by household specific statistical consumer price indices, and the heterogeneity of the household population has been taken into account by means of several parametrisations of the weight to be given to household size, or to children needs relative to those of adults. Social or aggregate evaluations have been performed by scalar indicators which permit to summarise judgements about an entire distribution by means of two statistics: the mean and an index of either relative or absolute inequality. Standard restrictions, as well as the requirement of additive separability, lead to a member of the General Entropy family of social evaluation functions in the relative case, and to several members of the Kolm-Pollack family in the absolute case. Comparisons have been made with and without weighting household adjusted expenditure by household size in the domain of the social evaluation functions.