Religiosity,income and wellbeing in developing countries

This study examines the relationship between religiosity, income and subjective wellbeing in a sample of developing countries using data from the World Values Survey Waves 2–6 (1990–2014). Beyond examining the effects of religiosity and income on subjective wellbeing separately and independently, we also examine how the interaction between religiosity and income affects wellbeing. Our results suggest that while both religiosity and income positively affect wellbeing, the effect of income on wellbeing is relatively stronger (quantitatively larger in size) than the effects of religiosity. Furthermore, we find evidence in favour of complementarity between religiosity and income which show stronger effects on wellbeing than the individual effects of income and religiosity.

     

The Living Wage,Economic Efficiency,and Socio-Economic Wellbeing in a Competitive Market Economy

Conventional economic wisdom views a Living Wage as costly in term of economic efficiency and competitiveness. I argue, based on x-efficiency theory, that higher wages need not cause any economic harm and can, on the contrary, generate higher levels of material wellbeing. Higher wages can be expected to induce x-efficiency and technological change cost offsets. In this context, an effective living wage, one that is above some subsistence minimum, can have a net efficiency effect on the economy. Therefore, a living wage greater than the wage rate generated by the free market cannot be predicted to generate economic harm. With the institutional parameters in place to realize a living wage, the economic pie can be expected to grow to accommodate the living wage.     

Measuring cross-country material wellbeing and inequality using consumer durables

We measure the mean and inequality in country material wellbeing based on households’ consumer durables, using household-level data from OECD’s PISA surveys for 40 countries over 2000–2012. Our consumption-based measures capture aspects of material wellbeing not captured fully by income-based measures. For 2012, tests show that the consumption-based metrics are more closely associated with objective mortality-related outcomes than are income-based measures; in 2000 (and over 2000–2012) each set of measures adds information relative to the other. The consumption-based measures may be particularly useful in revealing where income-based measures provide inaccurate indications of the mean and/or inequality in household living standards.     

Wealth Effects,Local Area Attributes,and Economic Prospects: On the Relationship between House Prices and Mental Wellbeing

This research exploits large variations in local house prices to investigate whether house prices correlate with mental wellbeing, and uses contrasting implications for the effect of house prices on the mental wellbeing of homeowners and renters to shed light on why this correlation might arise. I document a positive correlation between house prices and the mental wellbeing of both homeowners and non‐homeowners, which is inconsistent with a pure wealth effect. Instead this finding suggests that local house prices provide a reflection of available amenities and economic opportunities in the area.     

Uncertainty,Control, and Karl Polanyi’s Protective Response

Post-Keynesian institutionalist economists like Wallace Peterson and John Kenneth Galbraith recognized that the impact of uncertainty on economic wellbeing depends in part on the degree of control people have over the sources and consequences of it. Given the inability of government and other large institutions to reduce uncertainty or to provide citizens with the ability to manage it, mediating structures are considered as an alternative means of promoting economic security. The article concludes by describing and evaluating several of these alternatives.     

Wellbeing trajectories around life events in Australia

Wellbeing trajectories around key life events are calculated using HILDA data for Australia. Employing a panel quantile approach, a pan-distributional analysis of these major events identifies distinctive adjustment patterns across the subjective wellbeing distribution and differing orders of magnitudes. For all life aspects analysed, immediate impacts tend to be more acute at the lower end of the wellbeing distribution. The implication of this is that if we are concerned with measuring changes in wellbeing, the point at which we measure these changes is important. Given the increasing importance of wellbeing to broader measures of economic prosperity, these findings touch upon a number of important policy areas. A focus upon social ostracization and a reduction in the persistence of long-term unemployment are all suggested as ways of alleviating the detrimental impact of this important policy variable.     

Integration, social distress, and policy formation

I study the integration of regions in the form of a merger of populations, which I interpret as a revision of people’s social space and their comparison set; I illustrate the way in which a merger can aggravate social distress; and I consider policy responses. Specifically, I view the merger of populations as a merger of income vectors; I measure social distress by aggregate relative deprivation; I demonstrate that a merger increases aggregate relative deprivation; and I show that a social planner is able to reverse this increase by means of least-cost, post-merger increases in individual incomes, but is unable to counter it by relying exclusively on a self-contained income redistribution that retains individual levels of wellbeing at their pre-merger levels.     

Economic liberalization, capital mobility and informal wage in a small open economy: A theoretical analysis

Empirical evidence suggests that the size of the informal sector in the developing countries has increased considerably during the liberalized economic regime. The present paper purports to analyze the consequences of economic reforms on the wellbeing of the informal sector workforce using a three-sector general equilibrium model with two informal sectors. The theoretical analysis finds that different liberalized policies produce diverse effects on the informal wage and that these results are independent of the nature of capital mobility between the informal and the formal sectors. It also shows that labour market reforms, contrary to the common wisdom, are likely to produce favourable effects on the informal wage.     

Moral Hazard and Other-Regarding Preferences

The paper aims at obtaining new theoretical insights by combining the standard moral hazard models of principal–agent relationships with theories of other-regarding preferences, in particular inequity aversion theory. The principal is in general worse off, as the agent cares more about the wellbeing of the principal. When there are multiple symmetric agents who care about each other's wellbeing, the principal can optimally exploit their other-regarding nature by designing an appropriate interdependent contract such as a "fair" team contract or a relative performance contract. The approach taken in this paper can shed light on issues on endogenous preferences within organizations.     

Mental Health and Wellbeing and Unemployment

This article examines the relationship between mental health and wellbeing and unemployment utilising the 1995 National Health Survey (1995 NHS) and the 1997 National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing of Adults (1997 SMHWB) data sets. Three indicators of mental health and wellbeing are adopted. The first is a psychological wellbeing measure derived from responses to questions included in the 1995 NHS on time felt down, happy, peaceful, and nervous (the SF-36 mental health scale). The second indicator relates to diagnoses of mental disorders including substance use disorders, affective disorders and anxiety disorders. Our final indicator relates to suicidal thoughts and plans and (unsuccessful) suicide attempts. On the basis of these measures, unemployed persons exhibit poorer mental health and wellbeing outcomes than the full-time employed.     

Social integration and subjective wellbeing

Using data from the UK Community Life Survey, we examine the relationship between social integration and subjective wellbeing. We measure social integration along various dimensions, including frequency of interaction with one’s neighbors, perceived strength of belonging to one’s immediate neighborhood and country, length of residence in a neighborhood, and trust in neighbors. Overall, we find that social integration is associated with higher levels of subjective wellbeing. Specifically, our results suggest that an increase in the frequency of interaction with one’s neighbors is associated with an increase in subjective wellbeing. Similarly, an increase in respondent’s perceived strength of belonging to their immediate neighborhood (and country) is associated with an increase in subjective wellbeing. We further discover that an increase in the length of residence in a neighborhood is associated with an increase in subjective wellbeing, and this is also the case for an increase in the level of trust in one’s neighbour.     

Race and Income Distribution: Evidence from the USA,Brazil and South Africa

The aim of this paper is to provide some empirical evidence about black–white differentials in the distribution of income and wellbeing in three different countries: Brazil, the USA and South Africa. In all cases, people of African descent are in a variety of ways socially disadvantaged compared with the relatively more affluent whites. We investigate the extent of these gaps in comparative perspective, and analyze to what degree they are associated with differences in the observed characteristics of races, such as where they live, the types of household they have, or their performance in the labor market. We undertake this analysis with the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition at the means and with a propensity score approach at the entire distribution. Our results show how the factors underlying the racial divide vary across countries and income quantiles.     

Nature,roads or hospitals? An empirical evaluation of ‘sustainable development preferences’

While a key proposition is that a sustainable path is one where wealth does not decline, whether losses in natural capital can be compensated in wellbeing terms by more produced, social or natural capital remains an area of controversy. In this paper, we seek to better understand preferences for different combinations of assets that comprise (part of) the asset portfolio of a nation. In a study of coastal and marine natural assets, we test for the existence of weak or strong sustainability preferences using different compensation options (respectively produced capital and natural capital) offered to a sample of the public in Spain in the case of possible future oil spills. As a further element of this test, we provide an empirical reflection on Aldred (2002, 2006) and Turner (2007) who speculate that individuals may not view money as compensating for certain environmental losses whereas investments in social assets may offer a more acceptable compensation option. Our results do appear to circumscribe in some way the acceptability of investing in produced capital and reveal a tendency towards a preference for social capital compensation. Nevertheless, the size of the oil spill and the environmental beliefs of respondents also influence choices over the natural capital compensation option.     

Relative concerns at the workplace: on the design of the firm as a social space

This paper analyzes firm organization when social comparisons pervade the setting. We consider a firm employing two types of workers associated with different earnings. We assume that inter-group comparisons impinge significantly on the workers’ sense of wellbeing and on their behavior. Thereby we allow both relative deprivation as well as relative satisfaction sensed from (un)favorable income comparisons to coworkers to affect an individual’s utility and, in turn, skill acquisition. The consideration of relative concerns has several implications for the firm. We find that, next to the skill distribution and the composition of the workforce, output and labor productivity depend on the social environment.     

Growth, Inequality, and Well-Being: Intertemporal and Global Comparisons

We use several well-being measures that combine average incomewith a measure of inequality to undertake intertemporal andglobal comparisons of wellbeing. The conclusions emerging fromthe intertemporal analysis are that the impact of these measureson temporal trends in well-being is relatively small on average,but changing across the decades. In particular, it suggeststhat changes in well-being were understated in the 1960s and1970s and overstated in the 1980s and 1990s. Our global analysiscovering ca. 81 per cent of the world's population demonstratesthat global well-being is at least 50 per cent smaller thanworld per capita income if the unequal income distribution isalso factored in. Conversely, growth in world well-being hasbeen larger than world income growth between 1970–1998.Since the inclusion of inequality has an important impact onwell-being comparisons, it is of great importance to generatemore consistent and intertemporally as well as internationallycomparable data on inequality. (JEL I31, D63)     

Informal employment relationships and the labor market: Is there segmentation in Ukraine?

One of the most important factors that determine individuals’ quality of life and wellbeing is their position in the labor market and the type of jobs that they hold. When workers are rationed out of the formal segment of the labor market against their will, i.e., the labor market is segmented, their quality of life is limited, and their wellbeing is reduced. When they can freely choose between a formal or informal employment relationship, i.e., the labor market is integrated, their wellbeing can reach high levels even in the presence of informal employment. We, therefore, test whether the Ukrainian labor market is segmented along the formal-informal divide, slicing the data by gender and age. The analysis that we perform consist in the analysis of short-term and medium-term transitions between five employment states, unemployment and inactivity. We also analyze wage gaps of mean hourly earnings and across the entire hourly earnings distribution, controlling for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity. According to our results segmentation is present for dependent employees: for a large part of informal employees informal employment is used as a waiting stage to enter formal salaried employment and is not voluntarily chosen. As far as self-employment is concerned the evidence is mixed regarding segmentation in the Ukrainian labor market. This heterogeneity in outcomes implies that not all informal work is associated with a low quality of life and reduced wellbeing in post-transition economies.     

FDI,Poverty, and the Politics of Potable Water Access

How does foreign direct investment (FDI) affect the wellbeing of the poor? We address this question by analyzing the impacts of FDI on access to potable water. We predict that higher levels of greenfield FDI in water‐intensive sectors slow the rate of access to potable water in developing countries, with these adverse effects conditional on subnational politics. We hypothesize that this is more likely to occur in polities marked by relatively large poor and marginalized populations, where regulatory capture is more likely to occur. To test our intuition, we analyze subnational data on greenfield FDI in India, confirming that multinational investment in “thirsty” manufacturing sectors are negatively associated with improvements in potable water access. We then present a controlled comparison case study of two Indian states, Kerala and Rajasthan, highlighting the political mechanisms conditioning FDI's effects on potable water.     

以改善民生为重点 推动社会和谐发展

党的十七大提出加快推进以改善民生为重点的社会建设，是中国特色社会主义事业的重要组成部分。解决民生问题是中国特色社会主义本质特征的集中体现，是深入贯彻落实科学发展观的重要内容，是构建社会主义和谐社会的必然要求，也是全面建设小康社会的重要任务。解决民生问题要从人民群众最关心的问题出发，真正实践“权为民所用、情为民所系、利为民所谋”。     

Challenges in Measuring Poverty and Understanding its Dynamics: A South Asian Perspective

South Asia’s success at reducing poverty does not imply that the topic has become passé. Poverty rates are by now low, but this is because poverty lines are low as well. And the assessment of living standards and their dynamics are blurred by measurement and interpretation challenges. This paper relies mostly on South Asian examples to highlight four tensions: poorer versus richer households, rural versus urban locations, monetary versus non‐monetary dimensions of wellbeing, and household characteristics versus context. The discussion is conducted against the backdrop of the two analytical approaches with South Asian roots that have shaped the debate for decades. This review leads to three main recommendations: household survey data has to be exploited in a more thorough manner, data that is increasingly available from other sources needs to be incorporated more systematically in the analysis, and the multiple dimensions of wellbeing should be better integrated in a common framework.     

The anatomy of fragile states in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Understanding the interrelationship between fragility and indicators of wellbeing

According to most classifications, Sub‐Saharan Africa is the region of the world with the highest presence of fragile states. In this paper we examine the relationship between fragility and poverty, suggesting that countries may become trapped in a vicious circle of fragility and low levels of wellbeing. We consider fragility as a continuum and begin by reviewing available measures. These show the high presence of fragility in Sub‐Saharan Africa and allow the more fragile countries to be identified. There is seen to be a strong association between fragility, poor growth performance, and lower wellbeing in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Building on the strong evidence for the two‐way relationship between economic growth and poverty, we present an analysis of how the vicious circle linking poorer welfare outcomes and fragility may be able to be broken. We argue that building successful institutions is key here, and this can be enabled by specific policy interventions that are both poverty reducing and productive.