The extent to which governments’ policies for the containment of Covid-19 relied on voluntary compliance or on enforced social and economic restrictions, differs substantially across countries. Why so? The answer to this question is important because economic and psychological costs of an...

The formidable economic growth of China in the past few decades led to outstanding improvements in virtually all objective indicators of standards of life. However, these objective records are in striking contrast with subjective ones. Between 1990 and 2007, Chinese average subjective well-being...

While the various streams of environmentalism agree in claiming that the current patterns of economic activity are unsustainable for natural resources, they disagree in answering the following question: who is the responsible? Two different answers have been provided: the people or the...

Empirical evidence suggests that achieving sustainability requires reducing economic growth, not just greening it. This conclusion often leads to ecological pessimism, based on two beliefs. The first is that there is a human tendency to unlimited expansion; the second is that lack of consensus...

We present a simple growth model which has two original features: the strategic context considered, which is an evolutionary game, and the growth mechanism described, in which growth is caused by negative externalities. The emphasis in this growth mechanism is evidently different from that...

We model in an endogenous growth set-up the hypotheses that the expansion of market activities weakens social capital formation, and that firms can invest in formal mechanisms of control and enforcement to substitute for social capital (trust, work ethics, honesty). The model shows that the...

An extensive debate on the determinants of people's support for globalization concluded that it is necessary to leverage on welfare schemes to compensate those who lose from globalization. Yet, this solution is not universally accepted and it may not be viable in times of budget constraints. We...

Whether economic growth improves the human lot is a matter of conditions. We focus on Japan, a country where reforms in the mid-1990s shifted the country from a pattern of rampant economic growth and stagnant well-being, to one of modest growth and increasing well-being. We discuss the policy...

The controversies on the relationship (or `gradient') between GDP and subjective well-being oppose those who claim that the gradient is positive and stable around the world to those who argue that long-run trends of subjective well-being are flat despite economic growth. The possible existence...

Recent studies suggest that economic growth and well-being can grow together in the long run in presence of generous social safety nets, increasing social capital and declining income inequality. We put these conditions to a test in an attempt to explain the absence of a relation between...