Search

This study offers an uncommon perspective on household poverty dynamics over a 16-year period of sustained strong economic growth. We combine the large and high-quality consumption surveys used to produce official poverty statistics with information from a nationally representative household panel for rural areas to study poverty dynamics in Bangladesh between 2000 and 2016 using synthetic panel methods. We document the steady and substantial decline of persistent poverty, which has been particularly pronounced in rural areas. Transient poverty declined at a slower pace and affected twice as many households than persistent poverty (30% vs. 14%) between 2010 and 2016. There are stark differences in poverty dynamics across divisions, large and persistent disparities across education levels, and a strong but diminishing association with employment type in urban areas. High levels of mobility, relatively greater in urban Bangladesh, and the growing importance of transient poverty stress the need to consider measures to help poor households cope with income fluctuations and initiatives to address the needs of vulnerable households as core components of poverty reduction efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does money bring happiness? To answer this question, I study the consequences of income fluctuations caused by commodity price changes on well-being patterns in regions specializing in export agriculture. Using nationally representative survey data in a difference-in-differences framework, I investigate the effects of the 2010/11 short-term increase in the global price of cotton. I demonstrate that it can be viewed as a positive income shock for the cotton-producing communities of Tajikistan. The main results indicate that the net subjective well-being effects of the cotton price increase are negative: exposure to the shock at the aggregate level is associated with a notable decrease in the reported levels of financial and life satisfaction. To explain this paradox, I consider split sample analyses, which suggest that the shock led to within-community occupational sorting and that its well-being effects are negative among households that were in the agriculture sector before the shock and barely positive for newly become farmers. Observing the increasing volume of remittances in the world and their significance to the economy of Tajikistan, I also study how remittances affect the relationship between income volatility and happiness. Further estimations reveal that family remittances are not significantly affected by and can partially mediate the negative effects of short-term income changes. The mediating effects of remittances only affect financial satisfaction, suggesting that a mere compensation of losses does not fully restore the quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This work aims to analyse the relationship between public health efficiency and well-being considering a panel of 102 Italian provinces from 2000 to 2016 and evaluates if there are omitted variable biases and endogeneity biases and also evaluates if there are heterogeneous effects among provinces with different income levels. Design/methodology/approach: We use a multi-input and output bootstrap data envelopment analysis to assess public health efficiency. Then, we measure well-being indices using the min-max linear scaling transformation technique. A two-stage least squares model is used to identify the causal effect of improving public health efficiency on well-being to account for time-invariant heterogeneity, omitted variable bias and endogeneity bias. Findings: After controlling for important economic factors, the results show a significant effect of an accountable and efficient public health system on well-being. Those effects are concentrated in the North, the most economically, geographically and environmentally advantageous areas. Research limitations/implications: The use of the sample mean, probably the oldest and most used method for aggregating the indicators, could be affected by variable compensation, with consequent misleading results in the process of constructing the well-being index. Another limitation is the use of lagged values of the main predictor as an instrument in the instrumental variables setting because it could lead to information loss. Finally, the availability of data over a long period of time. Practical implications: The findings could help policymakers adopt measures to strengthen the public health system, encourage private providers and inspire countries worldwide. Social implications: These results draw the attention of local authorities, who play an important role in designing and implementing policies to stimulate local public health efficiency, which puts individuals in the conditions of achieving overall well-being in their communities. Originality/value: For the first time in Italy, a panel of well-being indices was constructed by developing new methodologies based on microeconomic theory. Furthermore, for the first time, the assessment of the relationship between public health efficiency and well-being is carried out using a panel of 102 Italian provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that people with low subjective wellbeing have heightened traffic accident risk. However, the roles of particular mental states, including overall evaluative subjective wellbeing and specific forms of mental distress such as depression or anxiety, have not hitherto been disentangled. Using an official representative population survey, we show that different forms of mental distress are associated with single versus multiple accident prevalence within a year. Anxiety (a lack of calmness) is strongly associated with having an accident. By contrast, conditional on having had at least one accident, overall life satisfaction is more strongly associated with having multiple accidents than are anxiety, depression or overall mental health. The relationship is n-shaped so that people with moderately low wellbeing have the highest multiple accident probability. These results are robust to the exclusion of respondents for whom reverse causality may be present and to the inclusion of variables representing other risky behaviours and representing social isolation. The findings imply that specific forms of intervention are likely to be needed to reduce accidents for people with moderately low subjective wellbeing who may engage in habitual risky behaviours that result in multiple accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates whether local government expenditure correlate with the Quality of Life (QoL) of the local population and whether high public expenditure are indicative of high or low QoL. Data, including information on public expenditure and objective QoL indicators, were gathered for Finnish municipalities from several existing databases and cover a period of 2015–2019. A composite indicator was constructed to measure municipal QoL performance. The results indicate that there is a clear correlation between public expenditure and QoL: the higher the public expenditure the lower the QoL of the local population. This is due to a greater demand for public goods in municipalities that have low QoL levels. Further, QoL and public expenditure levels are a fairly constant phenomenon. There was no evidence that changes in public expenditure and QoL would affect each other in the short term. The added value of this paper is that it fills parts of the research gap concerning our knowledge on the empirical links between public expenditure and QoL at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using 49 years of General Social Survey data (1972–2021), we investigate the relationship between individual happiness and support for government environmental expenditure. Contrary to expectations, we find a negative correlation between higher levels of happiness and support for environmental spending. Employing various methods to address endogeneity, including bivariate probit and instrumental variable approaches, we uncover a non-linear relationship where individuals with greater life satisfaction are less likely to support government environmental expenditure. We also find that tax morale serves as a moderating factor in this relationship. We validate these findings using World Values Survey data from over a hundred countries. Our results challenge conventional assumptions about the link between personal well-being and environmental policy attitudes. This unexpected relationship suggests that policymakers should develop targeted strategies to engage happier individuals (especially those with low tax morale) in supporting environmental measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse the prevalence of bullying in Germany during COVID-19, both as in-person bullying (in our context: school bullying) and via social media and electronic communication tools (cyberbullying). Using Google Trends data from 2013 to 2022 and exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment when schools switched to distance learning, we document stark changes in the prevalence of (cyber)bullying in Germany: Our results indicate that during school years affected by COVID-19, online searches for school bullying decreased by about 29 percent, while online searches for cyberbullying increased by about 40 percent during the same periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in the study of economic insecurity has grown in recent years. However, the ongoing debate about how to measure it remains unresolved. On the assumption that economic insecurity is related both to the forward-looking perception of future outcomes based on past experience and to the perception of one's own situation compared to others in the present, we propose a class of objective individual composite inter-temporal indices of economic insecurity. The indices are obtained by combining two components, one longitudinal and one cross-sectional. In order to combine the two components, we propose a novel method that takes advantage of the availability of subjective self-assessments of one's own economic conditions. The composite inter-temporal index is applied to the European Union-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) Longitudinal Dataset, encompassing a selection of European countries. Our analysis shows that the proposed class provides new insights into individual perceptions of well-being that are not captured by poverty and inequality measures. It also provides individual measures that can be used to study the relationship between economic insecurity and other phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An individual's financial situation positively impacts her subjective well-being (SWB) according to the literature. However, most existing studies focus solely on income, neglecting other aspects of an individual's financial situation such as wealth. In this paper, we empirically examine the relationship between SWB, income, household wealth, and its components. Additionally, we explore the significance of one's wealth relative to others' for SWB. Our contribution expands the limited literature on absolute and relative wealth and SWB by utilizing unique microdata from a German wealth survey, the German Panel on Household Finances (PHF). Our findings indicate that both assets and debts, alongside income, are associated with an individual's SWB. In particular, a similar relative increase in financial assets is associated with a greater increase in SWB than the same percentage increase in real assets, and SWB decreases as the level of unsecured debt increases. Furthermore, individuals tend to experience decreased SWB when comparing themselves to others with more assets or less debt. Interestingly, we observe divergent effects of relative wealth on SWB among younger and older individuals. These results underscore the significance of considering wealth, in addition to income, when analyzing determinants of SWB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subjective well-being (SWB) method has become a popular tool to estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) for non-market goods using widely available well-being data. In this method, the WTP measure contains the ratio of two coefficients (of the non-market good and consumption), which are both estimated in a regression on SWB. Computing confidence intervals for such ratios turns out to be error-prone, in particular when the consumption coefficient is imprecisely estimated. Even though this problem is known, many studies either do not report imprecision in the final estimate, or use inadequate methods. This paper compares five different methods to compute confidence intervals for normal ratio distributions: the delta, Fieller, parametric bootstrapping, and bootstrapping method, and a numerical integration of Hinkley’s formula. In a simulation, a large number of emulated SWB data sets are generated to calculate confidence intervals for WTP and the corresponding coverage rates with each method. The findings suggest that the delta method is the least accurate and not robust to lowering the statistical power or changing correlations between the estimators. All other methods are fairly accurate, robust, and can be recommended for use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to shed light on the contrasting findings about the effect of inequality on subjective wellbeing by decomposing income inequality into inequality of opportunity (due to factors that individuals cannot control) and inequality of effort. The two inequality components, calculated using EU-SILC data at regional and wave level, are matched with individual data on life satisfaction and its controls from the European Social Survey. We find that inequality of opportunity affects negatively and significantly subjective wellbeing, while inequality due to effort does not play a negative role. The negative effect of inequality of opportunity is stronger for women, the young, and the less educated. Our findings support the hypothesis that individuals are generally hit by that component of inequality (inequality of opportunity) that they perceive as unfair and beyond their control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates the financial well-being of older people in Poland, Spain and Denmark, with a particular focus on their ability to make ends meet. Using data from the SHARE survey to analyse retired individuals aged 65 to 79 years, it aims to identify the socio-economic factors that influence financial well-being among older people in these countries. In terms of methodology, it uses Light Gradient Boosting Machine algorithm and SHAP value calculations to predict the ability to make ends meet and determine the importance of 167 various features. The study concludes that household income and financial resources are the primary determinants of older people’s ability to make ends meet. The findings underscore the need for policymakers and practitioners the fields of ageing and economics to address specific challenges, such as housing costs in Denmark and food expenditure in Poland and Spain, to improve the financial well-being of older individuals.

AbstractWe use three waves (2011–2012 to 2016–2017) of nationally representative repeated cross section surveys to study the impact of crop diversification (number of crops grown) on household welfare, measured by real adult equivalent consumption and food expenditure and dietary diversity, in Afghanistan. Diversification is very low (almost half grow only one crop and fewer than a fifth grow three or more crops) but increased during the period. A multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) addressing selection bias and endogeneity is used to estimate average treatment effects of moving from one crop to two crops and then to three or more crops. The analysis shows that crop diversification increases household consumption and food spending, and, to a modest extent, dietary diversity compared to undiversified households. This holds irrespective of conflict although the effect varies; households experiencing violence tend to divert spending to food from other consumption spending and only the most diversified are able to increase spending compared to undiversified households. The evidence implies that supporting crop diversification can improve food security (through combined effects on spending and food diversity) and mitigate the negative impacts of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way in which governments foster sustainable homebuilding and housing is by subsidizing single homes' investment in sustainability technologies. The problem with these programs is that they incentivize inefficient investment by supporting technologies that make technical and economic sense on a small scale. Furthermore, this arrangement constitutes a flawed marketing system, producing a limited impact on global well-being and sustainability in the long term, as it rules out more efficient sustainability technologies. This paper addresses these shortcomings by designing a public policy proposal based on a contract between the government and homeowners that incentivizes the adoption of collective sustainable technologies, changing the marketing system with a shift in the behavior of a dominant actor, the government. Results indicate that an equilibrium in which the homeowners choose to participate in the new collective program in exchange for a subsidy is feasible and stable. Moreover, the generalization of the proposed program may generate a new way to incentivize the more efficient use of sustainable home technologies in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic was associated with a substantial increase in time spent alone. This paper uses US time-diary data to compare time spent alone in 2018–2019 with May 2020–May 2021, examining the extent to which changes in activities were associated with increases in time alone and to what extent time alone increased within activities. It also examines the association of time spent alone with pandemic severity and government policies. Increases in work at home were a substantial contributor to the increase in time spent alone, although increases in time alone at the workplace also played a role. Reallocation of leisure toward fewer social activities was another contributor. Higher state COVID rates increased time alone for single-person households, while government policies did little. There is some evidence that increases in time alone were associated with increases in activities that are substitutes for social activity, but such increases were a small proportion of the increase in time spent alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of the Chinese labor-force dynamics survey (CLDS) data, our study investigates the relationship between broadband infrastructure and happiness among rural households. By leveraging the “Rural BROADBAND” project as an exogenous shock for broadband infrastructure and employing a difference-in-differences (DID) framework, we find that households benefiting from this project experience higher levels of overall happiness after controlling for observables. We put forth two plausible explanations for this noteworthy finding. First, broadband infrastructure facilitates social connections among households by enabling the use of internet-based communication applications. Second, it enhances convenience in daily life by expanding internet accessibility. Furthermore, our research reveals that the positive impact of the broadband construction project on the overall happiness of rural households increases with household income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to estimate the relationship between working from home (WFH) and the subjective well-being of Chilean workers. In particular, the relationship between WFH and life satisfaction, job satisfaction and mental health problems is evaluated. The results show that women who work from home are more satisfied with their lives. Additionally, both men and women are more satisfied with their jobs. A positive relationship is found between working from home and mental health problems in the case of men. When we explore the existence of other heterogeneous results, it can be seen that for those who have children aged between 6 and 17 years, there is a positive relationship between WFH and job satisfaction. The same thing can be seen in homes where there is no overcrowding, and also among married people. For married women, a negative relationship is observed between working from home and mental health problems; however, this relationship is positive for single women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consequences of legal access to medical marijuana for individuals' well-being are controversially assessed. We contribute to the discussion by evaluating the impact of the introduction of medical marijuana laws across US states on self-reported mental health considering different motives for cannabis consumption. Our analysis is based on BRFSS survey data from close to eight million respondents between 1993 and 2018 that we combine with information from the NSDUH to estimate individual consumption propensities. We find that eased access to marijuana through medical marijuana laws reduce the reported number of days with poor mental health for individuals with a high propensity to consume marijuana for medical purposes and for those individuals who likely suffer from frequent pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a methodology for normative evaluation when preferences are context-dependent. We offer a precise definition of context-dependence and formulate a normative criterion of self-determination , according to which one situation is better than another if individuals are aware of more potential contexts of a choice problem. We provide two interpretations of our normative approach: an extension of Sugden's opportunity criterion and an application of Sen's positional views in his theory of justice. Our proposition is consistent with Muldoon's and Gaus' approaches of public reason in social contract theory, which account for the diversity of perspectives in non-ideal worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple selves is a conventional assumption in behavioural welfare economics for modelling intrapersonal well-being. Yet an important question is which self has normative authority over others. In this paper, we advance an argument for what we call the 'ontological approach' to personal identity in behavioural welfare economics. According to this approach, ethical questions – such as which preference should be granted normative authority over another – can be informed by the ontological criterion of personal persistence, which aims at determining what it takes for an individual to persist from one time to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the sources of climate information services (CIS), nature of CIS as well as impact of use of CIS on the welfare of smallholder cashew farmers. Using descriptive statistics for the sources, types and the nature of CIS, the study employed a combination of endogenous switching regression (ESR) and inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) in the impact analysis. From the results, we find that the main source of CIS used by farmers was radio. The farmers also responded that they received the climate information on time. In addition, we find that education, household size, climate disaster, farmer association, farm size, access to extension services, climate, and radio ownership had positive effects on the likelihood of using CIS. The results from the ESR model showed that use of CIS decreased assets, net farm income and yield even though it increased household dietary diversity (HDD). From the IPWRA model, we also find that users of CIS are more food insecure vis-à-vis non-users, a result which contradicts the aforementioned HDD results. The study highlights critical implications for agricultural economics, particularly in how smallholder cashew farmers access and use climate information services (CIS). Although CIS is meant to assist farmers in adapting to climate variability, this study reveals paradoxical outcomes, with users of CIS exhibiting lower asset values, net farm income, and yield, alongside greater food insecurity than non-users. These findings suggest that use of CIS alone, without adequate support and complementary resources, may not be sufficient to improve welfare.

Over the last one decade, most of the empirical studies on climate variability have largely concentrated on assessing the effect of climate variability on agriculture. Little attention has been given to the analysis of what factors determine the decision to adapt to climate variability and what impact does it has on welfare of the adapting households. This paper therefore, assesses the determinants of adaptation to climate variability and how it influences welfare of the farming households in Uganda. To achieve this, the study utilizes six waves of Uganda National Panel survey collected by Uganda Bureau of Statistics spanning over a period of 10 years from 2009 to 2019 and the switching regression model for empirical analysis. The findings indicate that adapting to climate variability is beneficial to adaptors as it safeguards welfare deterioration. On the other hand, presence of climate variability, age of the household head, the value of household assets, location, formal land ownership, having main occupation as agriculture and availability of extension services were identified as key determinants of the decision to adapt to climate variability among farming households in Uganda. These findings thus highlight the importance to have measures to improve adaptation process at the same time enhancing household welfare.