ABSTRACT
The money metric framework for the analysis of welfare has come in for some very strong criticism, most notably from Amartya Sen (for example Sen, 1987). How welfare can be measured and whether it is possible to say if welfare has changed between two points of time are at the centre of disputes both within and across disciplines. In this paper the issues posed for multidisciplinary research of differences of approach to the problem of measuring welfare will be addressed in two specific contexts. The first is the sense in which a measure of consumption expenditure can be treated as a measure of welfare. The second is whether larger households can be viewed as richer than smaller ones. These two issues are connected. As noted by White (2002) the relationship of welfare to household size is an example where different disciplines appear to be able to come up with different results. ‘Much anthropological writing on Africa is unambiguous in the view that larger families are better off … but these findings are at odds with the “stylised fact” from quantitative poverty profiles that larger households are poorer’ (ibid: 515).
