Has transition improved well-being?

In this paper we examine trends in economic well-being in transition countries from 1988 to 2008 to determine whether the populations of transition countries are better off today than prior to the transition process. To do this, we examine economic performance, inequality-adjusted well-being measures, subjective well-being measures, and non-income dimensions of well-being. While for many of the transition countries some indicators of well-being show improvements compared to the pre-transition period, the sharp rise in inequality and low levels of social indicators and subjective well-being suggest that well-being in many countries is similar to, or even below, the levels experienced prior to transition. The only indicators which have shown consistent improvements are measures of political and civil liberties.     

Surveying transitional experience and subjective well-being: Income, work, family

This paper reviews subjective well-being studies on income, work and family life with particular attention to transition countries. The main differences in conclusions for two types of economic systems seem to be the result of uncertainty and fast changing conditions and their effect on the perception of subjective economic conditions and on expectations formation. The terms ‘happiness’ and ‘life satisfaction’ should be distinguished when evaluating the success of socio-economic policies or of a transformation period as well as when predicting the reaction of economic systems to shocks/crisis. A short summary for more than 70 studies involving subjective well-being and attitudes indicators on data from the economies in transition is included.     

Perceptions of economic insecurity: Evidence from Russia

Economic insecurity is an inherent characteristic of the transition from a planned economy to a market-oriented economy and workers’ assessments of their economic insecurity have direct consequences not only for their happiness/well-being, but also on consumption and saving behavior. This study utilizes data from the nationally representative Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey to study perceptions of economic insecurity among workers in both rural and urban settlements. Analyzing three measures of perceived economic insecurity, we find that perceptions of insecurity were higher when economic conditions were deteriorating (1995–1998), and lower when economic conditions had stabilized (2000–2004). While perceived insecurity varies substantially by worker characteristics–those with less education, women, and unskilled and semi-skilled manual workers feel most vulnerable–, differences in observed characteristics explain a relatively small part of the ruralurban perceptions gap; other factors, such as different rates of economic recovery in rural and urban locales are also important. Individual well-being and household consumption tend to be lower when concerns about economic insecurity are present.     

Linking job insecurity to well-being and organizational attitudes in Belgian workers: the role of security expectations and fairness

The aim of this study was to investigate how perceptions of job insecurity and fairness associate with individual well-being (job satisfaction and general health) and organizational attitudes (organizational commitment and turnover intention), under the condition that the psychological contract as perceived by the employee includes a promise on job security, or not. More specifically, we suggest that (H1) job insecurity is negatively related to individual well-being and organizational commitment and positively related to turnover intentions when job security is expected as part of the psychological contract, (H2) that job insecurity is negatively related to fairness perceptions when job security is expected as part of the psychological contract, (H3) that fairness associates positively with individual well-being and organizational commitment and negatively with turnover intentions and (H4) that the association between job insecurity, individual well-being and organizational outcomes is mediated by fairness under the condition that job security is expected as part of the psychological contract. Thus, we propose a model of mediated moderation. Results based on a sample of Belgian employees (N = 559) supported our hypotheses for organizational outcomes. For individual well-being, the mediation framework was not conditional upon a perceived promise of job security as part of the psychological contract. We conclude that employees' perceptions of job insecurity and fairness are important factors in employees' well-being and their attitudes towards the organization. More importantly, these perceptions can in part be shaped by organizational agents such as managers and supervisors. Additionally, the active utilization of the psychological contract in management strategies seems to have favourable results for the fostering of pro-organizational attitudes among employees.     

Efficiency analysis of social protection expenditure in the Italian Regions

The attention and demand for greater social protection is increasing among the populations of all European countries. It is difficult to identify which of the structures and infrastructures, sectors and regional budgets are inefficient and/or negligent in respect of providing more social protection. In the political sphere the problem is examined from a qualitative point of view, because it is essential to have a valid decisional support system that provides useful information for structural and economic intervention programs devised to improve social protection. Regional spending on social protection is a fundamental component of individual well-being. This work is precisely aimed at assessing individual well-being in terms of technical expenses efficiency in the Italian Regions. Stochastic frontier analysis and a nonparametric deterministic model structure are the tools used to investigate the social protection determinants in the paper.     

Economic Activity and Social Indicators: A Rural-Urban Discontinuum?

A bstract . Comparisons of urban and rural areas tend to assume that a rural-urban continuum exists as regards economic and social indicators of well-being and that rural places are fairly homogeneous. Analysis of Kentucky counties indicates that rural-urban differences exist as regards economic well-being and objective social indicators. However, rural-urban differences are not consistent with respect to subjective social indicators; and there are important differences among economic types of rural counties as regards both economic and social indicators. Thus, the rural-urban continuum is not general and it is important to distinguish types of rural counties.     

Non-transferable non-hedgeable executive stock option pricing

To value non-transferable non-hedgeable (NTNH) contingent claims and price executive stock options (ESOs), we use a replication argument to translate portfolios with NTNH derivatives into portfolios of primary assets (only) with stochastic portfolio constraints. By identifying stochastic discount factors and finding subjective prices of NTNH European and American ESOs, for block and continuous partial exercise, we derive executives׳ optimal exercise policies, and use these to find objective prices/costs of ESOs to firms. Through numerical simulations, we obtain policy implications regarding ESOs׳ incentivizing efficiency. For the first time, we demonstrate that, unlike under block exercise, subjective prices under continuous partial exercise may be higher than objective ones. Moreover, volatility regimes and executives׳ “other wealth” are important in ESO pricing, and are thus essential to empirical executive compensation studies.     

Equity aspects of VAT in emerging European countries: A case study of Serbia

A belief that consumption taxation is inherently inequitable has been entrenched in a significant portion of the general public and was supported by early empirical evidence that suggested a highly regressive annual VAT incidence. However, it has been shown that much of the estimated annual VAT regressivity is due to the income under-reporting bias inherent in sample surveys. This bias is particularly important in emerging European countries due to a high shadow economy and the evasion of direct income taxes, which suggests household expenditures as a more meaningful indicator of well-being than registered income. Furthermore, theoretical considerations favor the lifetime incidence approach, whereby VAT is estimated to be proportional or mildly progressive. A micro-simulation analysis of the Serbian expenditure survey data yields incidence estimates in line with the existing literature from other countries. We show that a significant presence of own-source (small) farming production of food in many emerging European countries, including Serbia, presents an important progressivity-enhancing buffer compared to the VAT incidence in developed European countries. We conclude that the common beliefs of inherently inequitable VAT taxation are vastly overstated and poorly founded in the economic reality of emerging European countries such as Serbia, where VAT can be most adequately described as being mildly progressive.     

Benchmarking institutional variety in the eurozone: An empirical investigation

The European debt crisis has shown that the future of the European Union (EU) depends on the willingness of each member country to implement responsible policies, avoid moral hazard and uncooperative attitudes, and ensure stability and soundness. However, the European institutional variety means that each member country reacts differently to shocks and policies, follows a different path of recovery, and adapts to common institutions, including the common currency, in different ways. Helping countries to converge toward a situation that guarantees well-being, stability, and development at the national and community level is the goal of the European benchmark. This benchmark is a framework inspired by European treaties that, through the distance-to-frontier score methodology, aims to measure member countries’ performance and identify inefficiencies and negative externalities within the economic, social, and political institutions of each member country. The paper presents an empirical investigation of the European benchmark. Based on the results obtained, all countries can improve their performance, and none of them can be considered a model for the others. However, the Mediterranean and post-communist countries have more challenges to face and therefore need to make greater efforts.     

Happiness in transition: An empirical study on Eastern Europe

This paper analyzes the determinants of life satisfaction in a pooled data set of representative individual survey data from seven East European countries collected during the early phase of economic and political transformation using ordered logit models. Those core socio-demographic and economic variables relevant in the US and West European countries have a similar impact on happiness in Eastern Europe under conditions of dramatic economic, political, and social change. The individual effects of variables across countries are not statistically different from the results obtained from the pooled data set. Cross-country differences in aggregate happiness can be explained well by variations in the unemployment rates, the degree of political freedom and the human development index.     

Job Insecurity and the Difficulty of Regaining Employment: An Empirical Study of Unemployment Expectations

It is widely assumed that British workers have become more insecure over he last decade. This paper sets out to establish whether the popular assumption is correct. We examine changes in measures of workers' insecurity using direct measures of their unemployment expectations, using data colleted by the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative (SCELI) in 1986 and by the Skills Survey (SS) in 1997. The paper also investigates how closely subjective measures of insecurity are related to objective measures commonly used as proxies, and analyses how these expectations are determined. It finds that: i. In aggregate job insecurity, measured as the expected risk of job loss, has changed little, while the expected difficulty of regaining employment has fallen over the last decade. ii. Job insecurity has increased among non-manual workers, while it has fallen among non-manual workers, who were traditionally less secure in the first place. iii. Unemployment in the external labour market has a large impact onindividuals' expectations of unemployment and on their expectations of re-employment. vi. There is a strong positive association between a job being temporary and insecurity. It is valid, therefore, to see a possible problem of rising subjective insecurity if there is a rising proportion of temporary workers in the labour force. v. Job tenure and job insecurity follow a U-shaped relationship. vi. The fall in unemployment from 1986 to 1997 would have been predicted to induce a substantial fall in job insecurity, that this fall did not materialise suggests that there has been an upward shift in job nsecurity.     

The effect of urbanization on subjective well-being: Explaining cross-regional differences

Today, more than ever, it is becoming evident that cities and regions are crucial for the achievement of human well-being. In this perspective, the analysis of the effect of urbanization on subjective well-being at sub-national level is an issue of great relevance. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of urbanization on SWB at the regional level and, in particular, the moderator effect of the regional context in influencing this effect in Italy and Spain. From a methodological point of view, we apply a two-step approach as a graphical method, which allows us to consider individual and regional information in our analysis. Our findings indicate that urbanization significantly affects subjective well-being, especially in various regions of Italy. This cross-regional heterogeneity can be explained by different regional factors, which supports the idea that regional contexts can exert effects on achieving future people's well-being in cities.     

CALCULATING TRAGEDY: ASSESSING THE COSTS OF TERRORISM

Abstract.  The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured by counting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terrorist acts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs are surveyed and put in perspective. As economic consequences are only a part of the overall costs of terrorism, possible approaches for estimating the utility losses of the people affected are discussed. Results using the life satisfaction approach, in which individual utility is approximated by self-reported subjective well-being, suggest that people's utility losses may far exceed the purely economic consequences.     

Measuring well-being by a multidimensional spatial model in OECD Better Life Index framework

One of the most influential measures of multidimensional well-being, the Better Life Index, launched by OECD in 2011, contains a detailed overview of the social, economic, and environmental performances of different countries. Since its launch, a relevant number of empirical studies have been proposed on these data, but the role played by the distance between societal priorities and country-level performance in Better Life Index as well as in multidimensional well-being remains underexplored. We propose to address this issue by means of a multidimensional spatial model. We position the countries in the Euclidean K-dimensional space in which each dimension is a specific aspect of well-being, and we consider each individual's opinion on the same dimensions to calculate the personal optimal point. The distance between the optimal point of well-being and the actual observed point at individual level is the individuals' loss in well-being. We show that the societal loss at country-level is negatively related to the overall well-being and the main indices of quality of democracy. Based on the above evidence, we would argue that a multidimensional spatial framework represents a promising tool for the analysis of the whole class of multidimensional measures of well-being in which a group of individuals expresses the weights individually assigned to a set of dimensions within a pre-established range.     

Which formula for national happiness?

The World Happiness Report is published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and contains an international ranking of national average happiness, as measured by surveys of personal life evaluations. It also contains an analysis which tries to explain the happiness figures from more than 150 countries using data on six key variables. That analysis assumes the factors combine in an additive manner and therefore operate independently of each other. By contrast, we explore a multiplicative model, which allows for interactivity or synergy between factors, as well as the possibility of diminishing marginal benefit at higher levels of achievement. We find that this model provides a better fit to the data and is therefore superior in its explanatory power. The implication for policy-makers is that they should focus on improving those factors which are the lowest for their nation as this will provide greater relative benefits to subjective well-being. At an individual level this means focusing on improving conditions for those who are experiencing the lowest levels of well-being.     

基于幸福感视角的北川旅游经济发展研究

影响幸福的因素有很多,例如经济、婚姻、国家政策.但在北川这个经济和人均GDP还不发达的地区,通过发展旅游促进经济发展、提高人民收入仍然是提高当地百姓幸福感的最有效途径.     

Do European trade unions foster social solidarity? Evidence from multilevel data in 18 countries

Trade unions have been analysed quantitatively primarily in their role as vested interest organisations, attempting to quantify the excludable benefits they provide to members rather than examine their wider impact in an institutional context. Power resource theory acknowledges unions as social agents but assumes the willingness to oppose neoliberalism is constant, limited only by scarce power resources. Whilst true in general terms, this fails to explain trends of increasing labour market dualism in resource‐rich industrial relations regimes. This article examines social solidarity as a union power resource, measuring the impact of trade union membership on social attitudes of solidarity. Data were collected from the 2016 European Social Survey for 18 countries, grouped into five distinct industrial relations regimes. The findings suggest that, at European level, union membership still has a significant effect on all dimensions of social solidarity, but these relationships vary significantly across industrial relations regimes.     

Evaluating contemporary social exclusion in Europe: a hierarchical latent class approach

In recent years, the concept of social exclusion has received a renewed attention in scientific research, as well as in politics. In this contribution we propose a hierarchical Latent Class (LC) model for the analysis of differences and similarities about experiences and perceptions of social exclusion among European regions. Social exclusion is a situation that affects individuals, and derives from a multidimensional deprivation in several domains of life. In particular, we identify and define an economic, a social and an institutional dimension. The LCs, which structure the individuals with respect to a set of observed indicators, represent different typologies of social exclusion at individual level according to the three identified dimensions. The regional differences in the latent variable distribution are modeled following a nonparametric approach for the random effects. This multilevel extension leads to the identification of a typology of regions, allowing different social exclusion structures to stand out for different European areas. The hierarchical latent class approach proves to be profitable in investigating the relevance of different risk factors of social exclusion and their relationships, and in verifying whether, and to what extent, the same risks and disadvantages determine the same perception of marginalization and exclusion in different political, economic, social and cultural contexts. The analysis is carried out using the 56.1-2001 Eurobarometer Survey, which focused on poverty and social exclusion situations, from both a subjective and an objective point of view.     

The effects of marriage on volunteering and mental health: moderated mediation analysis

Past research has claimed that more volunteering experience could reduce an individual’s risk of depression. However, this conclusion may be too simplistic. This study aims to explore the effect of marriage within the complex relationships among volunteering, depression, and subjective well-being, which is utilized as the mediator. The 1,934 participants were randomly recruited from Taiwan. All the participants were asked to complete Subjective Well-Being Scale and Taiwan Depression Scale. The findings indicate that subjective well-being is a bridging-factor between volunteering and depression; whereas the model produces varied results according to marital status. For ‘single’ and ‘married’ people, subject well-being is a mediator, while for ‘never married’ people, that is a suppressor in the relationship between volunteering and depression.