As a measure of well-being we will use household consumption for 1991/92 (GLSS-3), 1998/99 (GLSS-4), 2005/06 (GLSS-5) and 2012/13 (GLSS-6). In that, we depart from the literature using income as a measure of well-being. Our choice is mainly motivated by measurement issues, which play a very relevant role in the case of Ghana and have to do with the quality of the income measures that one can obtain from the GLSS data. In economies where agriculture is an important and established sector, consumption has indeed proven preferable to income because the latter is more volatile and more highly affected by the harvest seasons, so that relying on income as an indicator of welfare might under- or over-estimate living standards significantly (see, for instance, Deaton and Zaidi, 2002, and Haughton and Khandker, 2009). On the theoretical ground, as consumption gives utility to individuals, the analysis of its distribution should be the most natural approach to study wellbeing. Income matters insofar as it gives access to consumption, which is the ultimate source of individual welfare. Consumption is a better measure of long-term welfare also because households can borrow, draw down on savings, or receive public and private transfers to smooth short-run fluctuations. The GLSS collects sufficiently detailed information to facilitate estimates of the total consumption of each household. It relies on consumption per adult equivalent<sup>1</sup> to capture differences in need by age and economies of scale in consumption. Scales of consumption by age and sex are computed by the Ghana Statistical Service.

The GLSS is based on a two-stage (non-stratified) sample design. Therefore, when the data are analyzed, sampling weights are used to account for the survey design. Besides, to enhance comparability of consumption data over the four waves, all expenditures have been deflated across both space<sup>2</sup> and time and expressed in 2005 constant prices – as well as converted, when necessary, from Ghanaian second cedi (GHC) to Ghanaian third cedi (GHS), i.e. for GLSS-3 to GLSS-5.

A summary of distributional statistics obtained from the GLSS data sets is given in Table 1. Besides the growth of the real mean and median consumption expenditures, the most notable feature is the picture that emerges across different indicators of inequality. The consumption shares of the poorest percentiles of the population decreased between approximately 0.9 and 1.4 % a year in the period examined, in contrast to what is observed for the richest percentiles, whose shares experienced average yearly increases of around 0.2 %. Inequality in household consumption was initially constant, but widened considerably between 1998/99 and 2005/2006 – a jump of about 7 % in the Gini’s coefficient and 20 % in the Theil’s index.<sup>3</sup> Inequality has remained constant at the higher level after 2005/06, but

> 1 We use adult equivalent scales because also the official consumption, poverty and inequality figures are expressed in adult equivalent terms.

> 2 The price deflator differs across the ten regions in which Ghana is divided and within each region by urban and rural areas.

> 3 Running a simple _t_ -test of the difference between Gini and Theil indices from the 1998/99 and 2005/06 samples yields a _p_ -value of around zero, which confirms the finding that points to increasing inequality over the 19982005 period at any of the usual significance levels.

4