Multidimensional Welfare Comparisons of EU Member States Before, During, and after the Financial Crisis: A Dominance Approach

Abstract

How did the financial crisis affect population welfare in EU member states in key dimensions such as income, health, and education? Using EU-SILC data, we seek to answer this question by way of first order dominance comparisons between countries and over time. The novel feature of our study is that we perform welfare comparisons on the basis of multi-level multidimensional ordinal data. We find that the countries most often dominated are southern and eastern European member states, and the dominant countries are mostly northern and western European member states. However, for most country comparisons, there is no dominance relationship. Moreover, only a few member states have experienced a temporal dominance improvement in welfare, and no member states have experienced a dominance deterioration.