What constitutes a good life? For most people, well-being involves more than a high income or material prosperity alone. Many non-material aspects, such as health, family life, living environment, job quality and the meaningful use of time are at least as important. Together, these factors also...

What constitutes a good life? For most people, well-being involves more than a high income or material prosperity alone. Many non-material aspects, such as health, family life, living environment, job quality and the meaningful use of time are at least as important. Together, these factors also...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of the inequality in well-being across different countries between 1975 and 2000. We treat well-being as a multidimensional concept focusing on three important dimensions of life: standard of living, health and education. Inequality in the three...

Multidimensional indices are becoming increasingly important instruments to assess the well-being of societies. They move beyond the focus on a single indicator and yet, are easy to present and communicate. A crucial step in the construction of a multidimensional index of well-being is the...

Individual well-being depends not only on income but also on other dimensions of life, such as health, the quality of social relations and of the environment, employment, and job satisfaction. In this chapter we survey the economic literature on how to construct such overall measures of...