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...

What predicts the evolution over time of subjective well-being? We correlate the trends of subjective well-being with the trends of social capital and/or GDP. We find that in the long and the medium run social capital largely predicts the trends of subjective well-being. In the short-term this...

What does predict the evolution over time of subjective well-being? We answer this question correlating cross country time series of subjective well-being with the time series of social capital and/or GDP. First, we adopt a bivariate methodology similar to the one used used by Stevenson and...

During the last 30 years US citizens experienced, on average, a decline in reported happiness, social connections, and confidence in institutions. We show that a remarkable portion of the decrease in happiness is predicted by the decline in social connections and confidence in institutions. We...

To what extent is economic growth liable to improve people’s subjective well-being in the long run? Recent studies identified three possible answers: economic growth matters a great deal; economic growth does not matter at all; economic growth matters, but other things matter more. Each of...

► Present work tests the cross-country comparability of a happiness equation including proxies of social capital and relational goods. ► It focuses on two extremely opposite groups of countries: the richest and the poorest ones. ► The happiness equation is stable in the two groups of...

The worrying decline of social capital (Putnam in Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster, New York, <CitationRef CitationID="CR27">2000</CitationRef>) and the disappointing trends of subjective well-being characterising the US (Easterlin in Nations and households in economic growth. Academic...</citationref>