Welfare rankings from multivariate data, a nonparametric approach

Economic and social welfare is inherently multidimensional. However, choosing a measure which combines several indicators is difficult and may have unintendend and undesirable effects on the incentives of policy makers. We develop a nonparametric empirical method for deriving welfare rankings for a social planner based on data envelopment, which avoids the need to specify a weighting scheme. We apply this method to data on Human Development.