Copyright © UNU-WIDER 2012 1 Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, 2 Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense. 3 Central Institute for Economic Management, Hanoi, 4 National Directorate of Studies and Policy Analysis, Ministry of Planning and Development, Maputo. E-mail of the corresponding author: channing.arndt@econ.ku.dk. This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER 'Growth and Poverty Project' (GAPP). UNU-WIDER gratefully acknowledges the financial contributions to the research programme by the governments of Denmark (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Finland (Ministry for Foreign Affairs), Sweden (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency—Sida), and the United Kingdom (Department for International Development). ISSN 1798-7237 ISBN 978-92-9230-499-7 Working Paper No. 2012/36 Ordinal Welfare Comparisons with Multiple Discrete Indicators: A First Order Dominance Approach and Application to Child Poverty Channing Arndt 1 , Roberta Distante 1 , M. Azhar Hussain 1 , Lars Peter Østerdal 2 , Pham Lan Huong 3 , Maimuna Ibraimo 4 April 2012 Abstract We develop an approach for making welfare comparisons between populations with multidimensional discrete well-being indicators observed at the micro level. The approach is rooted in the concept of multidimensional first order dominance. It assumes that, for each indicator, the levels can be ranked ordinally from worse to better, however no assumptions are made about relative importance of any dimension nor about complementarity/substitutability relationships between dimensions. We also introduce an efficient algorithm for determining dominance and employ a bootstrap approach that permits cardinal rankings of populations. These approaches are applied to household survey data from Vietnam and Mozambique. Keywords: ordinal, welfare, multi-dimensional poverty measurement, first order dominance, Mozambique, Vietnam JEL classification: I32, D63, O10