How can we assess the welfare of a society, its evolution over time and predict its change due to particular policy interventions? One way is to use survey-based welfare indicators such as the OECD Better Life Index. It invites people to weight a variety of quality of life indicators according...

How can we assess the welfare of a society, its evolution over time and predict its change due to particular policy interventions? One way is to use survey-based welfare indicators such as the OECD Better Life Index. It invites people to weight a variety of quality of life indicators according...

Many in both government and academia are showing renewed interest in developing new measures of national well-being. A new measure that goes “beyond GDP” to comprehensively capture non-market goods could be a useful supplement to traditional economic indicators for guiding policy and more...

Within the OECD Better Life Initiative, the Better Life Index (BLI) represents a major attempt to measure well-being and societal progress beyond GDP, following up the recommendations outlined in the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission report. Using a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach, we...

This report evaluates sources of international child well-being data to assess their suitability for supplementing national and transnational data sources to inform policy. The review of the leading surveys of children (and surveys of households with children) summarises the information...

The success and failure of any democratic government is gauged in terms of how effectively it has fulfilled its constitutional obligation of enhancing social and economic well-being, particularly the common man. While developed economies use a set of indices to measure well-being, a systematic...

In the context of the multidimensional measurement of complex phenomena, the major focus of the recent literature has been on the choice of the dimensions' weights and the shape of the aggregation function, while few studies have concentrated on how normalisation influences the results. With the...

Welfare economic analysis of health issues and policies can provide well balanced orderings of the state of the economy. This paper provides an innovative framework for welfare economic analysis of the relationships between economic growth, health outcomes and social welfare for both a...

Die Studie untersucht, wie der Soziallastenansatz in Rheinland-Pfalz künftig ausgestaltet sein sollte. Es wird dargestellt, daß eine Orientierung an den tatsächlichen Mehrausgaben der Gebietskörperschaften nicht anreizkompatibel ist und daher nicht sinnvoll erscheint. Ein künftiger Ansatz...

Older people experience high rates of depression and suicide, yet they make a positive net contribution to the economy through activities such as employment, volunteering, and looking after grandchildren. The wellbeing of older people is therefore important not only on moral but also economic...