Tue, 3 Apr 2001

Life and death

Dear Ms Bonilla-Chacin

 I am very interested in reading your paper "Life and Death among the Poorest"
 after seeing a table from it in "The Evolution of Thinking About Poverty" by
 Ravi Kanbur and Lyn Squire.  I wonder if I could get hold of a copy of the
 paper or the survey data.

 I am working on a way of taking mortality into account when measuring welfare
 outcomes for a population over time.  I was very pleased to see your table
 show what seems intuitively right but not often acknowledged   -  the bottom
 decile do far worse than the next decile.   The implications seem to me
 rather important.   

 Data such as yours suggest to me that a cohort study is not needed to get a
 fairly clear picture of welfare outcomes prior to death (for example, income
 levels).    The data also mean that the population of the bottom decile
 changes very substantially over time.   Those who died (mostly children with
 no income) may be replaced by people from the next decile up.   To me, no
 outcome measure should look better as a result of higher numbers of deaths.
 Your data suggest that this effect may be large.

 Thank you very much.

 Matt Berkley
 Oxford

Subj: Re: Life and death

Date: 4 April 2001

From:    meb3@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu (Maria E Bonilla-chacin)

Dear Mr. Berkley:

Thank you very much for your message.  We are now working on a revision
and we would feel more comfortable sending you the new version.  As soon
as it is ready I'll send it to you.

Sincerely,

Maria Eugenia Bonilla