Rent Imputation for Welfare Measurement : A Review of Methodologies and Empirical Findings

Balcazar, Carlos Felipe ; Ceriani, Lidia ; Olivieri, Sergio ; Ranzani, Marco

World Bank Group, Washington, DC

关键词: ABSOLUTE POVERTY;    ABSOLUTE POVERTY LINE;    AGRICULTURE;    APARTMENTS;    BASKET OF GOODS;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-7103
RP-ID  :  WPS7103

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

As well acknowledged in the literature,housing is often the dominant consumption good for mosthouseholds. As such, it should be included in acomprehensive welfare aggregate to measure people'sliving standards accurately. However, assigning a value tothe flow of the dwelling for homeowners and nonmarkettenants is problematic. Over the last decades severalestimation techniques have been proposed and implemented bypractitioners covering from very simple to sophisticatedapproaches. This paper provides an extensive review ofdifferent methods to impute rent, commonly used for welfareanalysis. It also gives an overview of how this problem hasbeen addressed by other economic domains, namely nationalaccounts, price indices, purchasing power parities, andtaxation. Finally, after setting up a theoretical framework,the paper summarizes the empirical findings about thedistributional impact of including imputed rents in welfare aggregates.