Paper short abstract:

This presentation will provide results from the Disability Data Initiative’s Disability Statistics Database and its associated report (both are to be launched in June 2024). It will highlight key results and opportunities for further research documenting wellbeing across disability status.

Paper long abstract:

Expanding capabilities for all requires data and statistics, in particular for groups that have been traditionally disadvantaged and invisible in society. For persons with disabilities, it requires statistics that are based on concepts that are in line with a capability approach to disability, disaggregated by disability status, and reflect various aspects of the lives of persons with disabilities and their diversity.

This presentation will provide results from the Disability Data Initiative’s Disability Statistics Database and its associated report (both are to be launched in June 2024). In particular, it will include (i) a systematic analysis of the disability questions in national censuses and household surveys globally between 2009 and 2023 and (ii) indicators disaggregated across disability status for 40 countries with census or household survey data that are based on internationally comparable disability questions.

This report finds that disability questions that meet international standards of comparability, i.e. those that collect information on functional difficulties (e.g. difficulty seeing, hearing, walking) have been increasingly adopted. Yet, disability questions of any kind are absent in one in four countries and in two-thirds of datasets. In many countries, comparative assessments of wellbeing across disability status are impossible and persons with disabilities continue to be invisible.

The report also presents a microdata analysis for 40 countries with results on functional difficulty prevalence and wellbeing in various domains. In the countries under study, functional difficulties are not rare. Across countries, the median share of the adult population with any functional difficulty stands at 12.6%, while the median share of households with adults with functional difficulty is at 27.8%.

The report also finds significant inequalities associated with functional difficulties in terms of education, health, work and standard of living (e.g. electricity). A disability gap, i.e. a disadvantage for persons with functional difficulties compared to persons with no functional difficulty, is consistently found across countries and disaggregation method in terms of educational attainment, literacy, food insecurity, exposure to shocks, asset ownership, health expenditures and multidimensional poverty.

The presentation will end with implications for further research. Given the availability of internationally comparable statistics, it will propose future research directions to better understand the drivers of inequalities using such statistics. The stark inequalities highlight the urgent need for policies for the rights and the wellbeing of persons with disabilities.