The subjective well-being approach to environmental valuation is applied to analyze the valuation of greenhouse gas emissions with a fairness-adjustment in the valuation exercise. Results indicate that industrialized countries have high willingness-to-pay to reduce emissions. Developing countries differ in their valuations. Results indicate that…

The paper explores attitudes to chronic poverty in a cross-section of developed and developing countries contributing data to the World Values Survey Wave Three (1994-1998). The analysis finds a consistent belief among a majority of respondents that poverty is persistent. The paper also explores the factors influencing public attitudes to chronic…

This paper shows that the partisan composition of government is strongly related to the well-being of citizens, measured by the reported level of life satisfaction and suicide rates in industrial countries. Our analysis, using survey data of 14 nations between 1980 and 2002, shows that the presence of left-leaning parties in government is…

This study critically investigates the suitability of United Nations' composite indices and other related measures--among which the Gender Inequality Index just released in 2010--to capture gender inequalities in the context of "highly developed" countries, focusing on the case of Europe. Our results indicate that many of the gender gaps…

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a comparison of the level in human development of the poor with…

This explores the reasons that paid work time may be rising, at least in anglophone countries. Three explanations are discussed. (1) An historical reversal of the work/leisure gradient with respect to social position or social status. This gradient was once positive, but is now negative; evidence of this change from 11 developed countries is drawn…

It is of paramount concern for economists to uncover the factors that determine economic growth and social development. In recent years a new field of investigation has come to the fore in which social capital is analysed in order to determine its effect on economic growth. Along these lines the work presented here examines the relationships that…

The objective of this paper is to analyze the effect of various compositions of human capital on economic growth. We construct alternative measures of human capital composition using five fields of study. In each instance, the measure represents the number of graduates in the respective field as a percentage of all graduates. The measures are as…

We examined factors related to attitudes toward marriage and the importance of having children in both the US and Singapore. Path analysis indicated that life dissatisfaction leads to materialism, and both of these factors lead to favorable attitudes toward marriage, which leads to greater desire for children. Further analysis indicated this model…

The evidence for any relationship between GDP/capita growth and growth in subjective wellbeing (SWB) in wealthier countries is disputed, at best. However, there are a number of reasons commonly articulated for thinking the relationship should be stronger in less developed countries (LDCs). This paper looks at both reasons for expecting the…

The International Wellbeing Index (IWI) has been developed as a complementary measure to already well-known economic measures, and as a tool for cross-cultural comparisons. It comprises two subscales: the Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI) and the National Wellbeing Index (NWI). The aims of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, to test the psychometric…