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...

This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of equivalent affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus...

This paper analyses subjective economic well-being in several Eastern European countries from 1991 to 1995. Economic well-being explains a significant part of the variation in overall life satisfaction of Eastern Europeans. In an ordered logit model, the determinants of subjective economic...

This paper develops policy recommendations on the use of cluster-based economic policies and the adoption of a new concept of competitiveness in the context of the new growth path that WWWforEurope aims to outline. A first section discusses summarizes key findings from the previous research...

This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of equivalent affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus...

Recent studies focused on testing the Easterlin hypothesis (happiness and national income correlate in the cross-section but not over time) on a global level. We make a case for testing the Easterlin hypothesis at the country level where individual panel data allow exploiting important...

This paper deals with the effects of social participation activities on life satisfaction. Using the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) for 2010, I present gender specific differences for several social activities, such as club memberships of political, welfare, health or more leisure time...

This study aims to assess the extent to which the economic integration process of the EU and the Eurozone, expressed by the convergence of GDP per capita, is reflected in the convergence of economic well-being of households, revealed by income and consumption, during the last 20 years...

Throughout Germany real income has trended upward since 1991, but life satisfaction has risen in the East, fallen in the West, and been fairly stable for Germany as a whole. By 1997 the initial excess of West over East Germany was cut by over one-half; since then, the differential has changed...