The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy PDF Download

Author: Matthew D. Adler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199325839
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 985

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Book Description
What are the methodologies for assessing and improving governmental policy in light of well-being? The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary treatment of this topic. The contributors draw from welfare economics, moral philosophy, and psychology and are leading scholars in these fields. The Handbook includes thirty chapters divided into four Parts. Part I covers the full range of methodologies for evaluating governmental policy and assessing societal condition-including both the leading approaches in current use by policymakers and academics (such as GDP, cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, inequality and poverty metrics, and the concept of the "social welfare function"), and emerging techniques. Part II focuses on the nature of well-being. What, most fundamentally, determines whether an individual life is better or worse for the person living it? Her happiness? Her preference-satisfaction? Her attainment of various "objective goods"? Part III addresses the measurement of well-being and the thorny topic of interpersonal comparisons. How can we construct a meaningful scale of individual welfare, which allows for comparisons of well-being levels and differences, both within one individual's life, and across lives? Finally, Part IV reviews the major challenges to designing governmental policy around individual well-being.

Author: Gaël Brulé
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030055353
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
This volume examines the impact of wealth on quality of life and subjective well-being (SWB). As wealth is related to economic, environmental and social features of societies, this volume serves as an important resource in understanding economic and SWB. It further discusses a variety of experiences and consequences of inequalities of wealth. Through the availability of wealth data in recent international surveys, this volume explores the multiple relations between wealth and SWB. Structured around four main pillars the book presents analysis of the topic at various levels such as theoretical and conceptual, methodological and empirically, ending with a section on distribution and policies.

Author: Panel on Measuring Subjective Well-Being in a Policy-Relevant Framework
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309294479
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Subjective well-being refers to how people experience and evaluate their lives and specific domains and activities in their lives. This information has already proven valuable to researchers, who have produced insights about the emotional states and experiences of people belonging to different groups, engaged in different activities, at different points in the life course, and involved in different family and community structures. Research has also revealed relationships between people's self-reported, subjectively assessed states and their behavior and decisions. Research on subjective well-being has been ongoing for decades, providing new information about the human condition. During the past decade, interest in the topic among policy makers, national statistical offices, academic researchers, the media, and the public has increased markedly because of its potential for shedding light on the economic, social, and health conditions of populations and for informing policy decisions across these domains. Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience explores the use of this measure in population surveys. This report reviews the current state of research and evaluates methods for the measurement. In this report, a range of potential experienced well-being data applications are cited, from cost-benefit studies of health care delivery to commuting and transportation planning, environmental valuation, and outdoor recreation resource monitoring, and even to assessment of end-of-life treatment options. Subjective Well-Being finds that, whether used to assess the consequence of people's situations and policies that might affect them or to explore determinants of outcomes, contextual and covariate data are needed alongside the subjective well-being measures. This report offers guidance about adopting subjective well-being measures in official government surveys to inform social and economic policies and considers whether research has advanced to a point which warrants the federal government collecting data that allow aspects of the population's subjective well-being to be tracked and associated with changing conditions.

Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
ISBN: 9264191658
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
These Guidelines represent the first attempt to provide international recommendations on collecting, publishing, and analysing subjective well-being data.

Author: Mr.Marshall B Reinsdorf
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1513544586
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 49

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Book Description
Calls for a more people-focused approach to statistics on economic performance, and concerns about inequality, environmental impacts, and effects of digitalization have put welfare at the top of the measurement agenda. This paper argues that economic welfare is a narrower concept than well-being. The new focus implies a need to prioritize filling data gaps involving the economic welfare indicators of the System of National Accounts 2008 (SNA) and improving their quality, including the quality of the consumption price indexes. Development of distributional indicators of income, consumption, and wealth should also be a priority. Definitions and assumptions can have big effects on these indicators and should be documented. Concerns have also arisen over potentially overlooked welfare growth from the emergence of the digital economy. However, the concern that free online platforms are missing from nominal GDP is incorrect. Also, many of the welfare effects of digitalization require complementary indicators, either because they are conceptually outside the boundary of GDP or impossible to quantify without making uncertain assumptions.

Author: Martin Ravallion
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Bank
Languages : en
Pages : 43

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Book Description
Abstract: April 1999 - As conventionally measured, current household income relative to a poverty line can only partially explain how Russian adults perceive their economic welfare. Other factors include past incomes, individual incomes, household consumption, current unemployment, risk of unemployment, health status, education, and relative income in the area of residence. Paradoxically, when economists analyze a policy's impact on welfare they typically assume that people are the best judges of their own welfare, yet resist directly asking them if they are better off. Early ideas of utility were explicitly subjective, but modern economists generally ignore people's expressed views about their own welfare. Even using a broad set of conventional socioeconomic data may not reflect well people's subjective perceptions of their poverty. Ravallion and Lokshin examine the determinants of subjective economic welfare in Russia, including its relationship to conventional objective indicators. For data on subjective perceptions, they use survey responses in which respondents rate their level of welfare from poor to rich on a nine-point ladder. As an objective indicator of economic welfare, they use the most common poverty indicator in Russia today, in which household incomes are deflated by household-specific poverty lines. They find that Russian adults with higher family income per equivalent adult are less likely to place themselves on the lowest rungs of the subjective ladder and more likely to put themselves on the upper rungs. But current household income does not explain well self-reported assessments of whether someone is poor or rich. Expanding the set of variables to include incomes at different dates, expenditures, educational attainment, health status, employment, and average income in the area of residence doubles explanatory power. Healthier and better educated adults with jobs perceive themselves to be better off, controlling for income. The unemployed view their welfare as lower, even with full income replacement. Individual income matters independent of per capita household income. Relative income also matters. Living in a richer area lowers perceived economic welfare, controlling for income and other factors. This paper-a product of Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the group to better understand the relationship between objective and subjective economic welfare. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Policies for Poor Areas (RPO 681-39). The authors may be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected].

Author: Joseph E. Stiglitz
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620975726
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Today's leading economists weigh in with a new "dashboard" of metrics for measuring our economic and social health "What we measure affects what we do. If we focus only on material well-being—on, say, the production of goods, rather than on health, education, and the environment—we become distorted in the same way that these measures are distorted." —Joseph E. Stiglitz A consensus has emerged among key experts that our conventional economic measures are out of sync with how most people live their lives. GDP, they argue, is a poor and outmoded measure of our well-being. The global movement to move beyond GDP has attracted some of the world's leading economists, statisticians, and social thinkers who have worked collectively to articulate new approaches to measuring economic well-being and social progress. In the decade since the 2008 economic crisis, these experts have come together to determine what indicators can actually tell us about people's lives. In the first book of its kind, leading economists from around the world, including Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Elizabeth Beasely, Jacob Hacker, François Bourguignon, Nora Lustig, Alan B. Krueger, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, describe a range of fascinating metrics—from economic insecurity and environmental sustainability to inequality of opportunity and levels of trust and resilience—that can be used to supplement the simplistic measure of gross domestic product, providing a far more nuanced and accurate account of societal health and well-being. This groundbreaking volume is sure to provide a major source of ideas and inspiration for one of the most important intellectual movements of our time.

Author: Alan B. Krueger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226454576
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Surely everyone wants to know the source of happiness, and indeed, economists and social scientists are increasingly interested in the study and effects of subjective well-being. Putting forward a rigorous method and new data for measuring, comparing, and analyzing the relationship between well-being and the way people spend their time—across countries, demographic groups, and history—this book will help set the agenda of research and policy for decades to come. It does so by introducing a system of National Time Accounting (NTA), which relies on individuals’ own evaluations of their emotional experiences during various uses of time, a distinct departure from subjective measures such as life satisfaction and objective measures such as the Gross Domestic Product. A distinguished group of contributors here summarize the NTA method, provide illustrative findings about well-being based on NTA, and subject the approach to a rigorous conceptual and methodological critique that advances the field. As subjective well-being is topical in economics, psychology, and other social sciences, this book should have cross-disciplinary appeal.

Author: Michael Eid
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 1606230735
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
This authoritative volume reviews the breadth of current scientific knowledge on subjective well-being (SWB): its definition, causes and consequences, measurement, and practical applications that may help people become happier. Leading experts explore the connections between SWB and a range of intrapersonal and interpersonal phenomena, including personality, health, relationship satisfaction, wealth, cognitive processes, emotion regulation, religion, family life, school and work experiences, and culture. Interventions and practices that enhance SWB are examined, with attention to both their benefits and limitations. The concluding chapter from Ed Diener dispels common myths in the field and presents a thoughtful agenda for future research.

Author: Pablo Beramendi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316300757
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democracies has undergone profound changes: sweeping deindustrialization, tertiarization of the employment structure, and demographic developments. This book provides a synthetic view, allowing the reader to grasp the nature of these structural transformations and their consequences in terms of the politics of change, policy outputs, and outcomes. In contrast to functionalist and structuralist approaches, the book advocates and contributes to a 'return of electoral and coalitional politics' to political economy research.