Using Capabilities as an Alternative Indicator for Well-being

This paper examines the potential of self-reported information on capabilities as an alternative indicator and aggregator for well-being. We survey a population of 18 year old first-year Bachelor students in applied economics and business studies and demonstrate a way in which capabilities can be measured on the level of life domains as well as on the general level of ‘life as a whole’. The data confirm the theoretical hypothesis that the set of capabilities is larger than the achieved functionings. We investigate and compare which variables influence general capabilities and satisfaction with life. We find that both concepts are equally depending on the ‘mood of the day’. On the other hand, we find some diverging influences that call for a debate on the (policy) relevance of different well-being concepts and their determining variables. The capabilities interpretation of well-being points to an important role of the parents (especially when they are divorced or rather strict) while the information on satisfaction is more related to personal and situational characteristics (such as not being single or the number of family visits).     

Does National Income Inequality Affect Individuals’ Quality of Life in Europe? Inequality,Happiness, Finances,and Health

This paper analyses the effect of income inequality on Europeans’ quality of life, specifically on their overall well-being (happiness, life satisfaction), on their financial quality of life (satisfaction with standard of living, affordability of goods and services, subjective poverty), and on their health (self-rated health, satisfaction with health). The simple bivariate correlations of inequality with overall well-being, financial quality of life, and health are negative. But this is misleading because of the confounding effect of a key omitted variable, national economic development (GDP per capita): Unequal societies are on average much poorer (r = 0.46) and so disadvantaged because of that. We analyse the multi-level European Quality of Life survey conducted in 2003 including national-level data on inequality (Gini coefficient) and economic development (GDP) and individual-level data on overall well-being, financial quality of life, and health. The individual cases are from representative samples of 28 European countries. Our variance-components multi-level models controlling for known individual-level predictors show that national per capita GDP increases subjective well-being, financial quality of life, and health. Net of that, the national level of inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, has no statistically significant effect, suggesting that income inequality does not reduce well-being, financial quality of life, or health in advanced societies. These result all imply that directing policies and resources towards inequality reduction is unlikely to benefit the general public in advanced societies.     

Three faces of international inequality

Recent studies of international inequality have focused mostly on the trend in international income inequality. This article extends the analysis of international inequality to also include inequalities in education and health. Analyses of time-series data for more than 100 countries show that international income inequality declined from 1980 to 2003 as several large, poor Asian countries outpaced many Western countries in national income growth. By contrast, international health inequality followed a U-shaped trend, falling in the 1980s before rising in the 1990s. The turnaround in health inequality coincides with a trend of declining life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa. International educational inequality experienced the sharpest recent decline, spurred by the global expansion of formal schooling. These findings confirm that there is more to international inequality than income inequality alone and suggest that patterns of inequality in the current era of globalization are likely more complex than many leading theories suggest.     

基于因子分析法的我国区域人类发展实证研究

本文介绍并引进了以因子分析法为基础构建的人类发展指数(HDI)。通过指标体系的构建、评估方法的选择及与联合国开发计划署制订的人类发展指数比较发现,基于因子分析法的人类发展指数较之传统的方法更适合测算与度量我国区域人类发展水平。     

Subjective Well-Being and Household Factors in South Africa

This paper uses a household surveyfrom South Africa to estimate a model ofsubjective well-being based upon poverty andhousehold characteristics including housing,sanitation, and transportation. Following Sen,we allow for factors in addition to income andwe begin to incorporate functionings andcapabilities as determinants of well-being. This study finds that important differencesexist among groups based upon their economicstatus. For the poorest quartilestransportation and housing play the mostimportant role in determining well-being, whilefor the richest quartiles, sanitation, water,energy, education and health are relativelymore important. These results have importantpublic policy implications because many of thefactors affecting well-being have large publicgood components. In addition, these resultscould be used to help governments focus aid inorder to improve well-being.     

Women’s Well-Being in Iran: Territorial Analysis Using a Multidimensional Approach

This paper employs a multidimensional index for assessing women’s well-being in Iranian provinces using demographic and health survey macro data. Besides economic status as a traditional dimension for objective well-being, other factors such as health, education, risk, and technology as well as self-reported life satisfaction and happiness (psychological well-being) have been included as non-material well-being dimensions. We found that the values of women’s well-being are distributed unequally across the provinces. Southern provinces demonstrate the worst performances and central provinces have the best. Generally, Iranian women are in poor condition in terms of economic variables (e.g. income and participation in the job market), psychological well-being (life satisfaction), HIV literacy, use of the internet, and access to mass media. On the other hand, in recent years, they have made significant progress in education (such as the rate of literacy, high school degree), and health (safe pregnancy care and nutritional supplements).     

The health-schooling relationship: evidence from Swedish twins

Health and education are known to be highly correlated, but the mechanisms behind the relationship are not well understood. In particular, there is sparse evidence on whether adolescent health may influence educational attainment. Using a large registry dataset of twins, including comprehensive information on health status at the age of 18 and later educational attainment, we investigate whether health predicts final education within monozygotic (identical) twin pairs. We find no evidence of this and conclude that health in adolescence may not have an influence on the level of schooling. Instead, raw correlations between adolescent health and schooling appear to be driven by genes and twin-pair-specific environmental factors.     

The Interplay between Educational Achievement, Occupational Success, and Well-Being

Many studies have examined the effect of life events, education, and income on well-being. Conversely, research concerning well-being as a predictor of life course outcomes is sparse. Diener’s suggestion “to inquire about the effects of well-being on future behavior and success” has, with some exceptions, not yet come to fruition. This article contributes to this body of research. We conceptualize and analyze the interplay between educational achievement, occupational success, and well-being as a complex process. The relationship between these domains is examined drawing on a structure-agency framework derived from Bourdieu and Social Comparison Theory. Social comparison between adolescents and their parents is suggested to be the mechanism explaining the effects of successful and unsuccessful intergenerational transmission of educational achievement and occupational success on well-being. It is further argued that well-being may serve as an individual resource by fostering educational and occupational outcomes. Panel data from the Transition from Education to Employment (TREE) project, a Swiss PISA 2000 follow-up study, was used. The interplay between well-being and successful and unsuccessful intergenerational transfer of educational attainment was analyzed in an autoregressive cross-lagged mixture model framework. Social comparison was found to be related to well-being, while well-being proved to significantly increase the probability of successful intergenerational transfer of educational attainment.     

Life Expectancy as an Objective Factor of a Subjective Well-Being

The paper has two parts. In the first part we offer a definition of well-being which makes life expectancy an explicit variable. We recognize the importance of happiness as a significant aspect of any definition of well-being, but we side-step the issue of what determines its level or how to measure it, and concentrate instead on the consequences of our new variable, life expectancy. We argue that life is valued for its quality, and, if positive, its extension is an improvement of well-being. From this we show how, given certain assumptions, disparate problems that have moral and/or social significance can be approached from the perspective of improving well-being. We close the first part by showing that our definition has enough flexibility to be used for that class of decisions which require tradeoffs between quality of life (happiness) and life expectancy. As a corollary we show that attitudes toward risk depend on expectations, and on some occasions, age itself. In the second part we argue, first, that real economic factors, not reducible to mere psychological ones, may still offer an adequate explanation for the fact that absolute income and happiness do not always correlate well. However, we take no position on the many controversies, such as whether it is relative or absolute increases in wealth that bears most directly on changes in happiness. We confirm through statistical analysis (simple regressions) the well established influence that absolute income has on life expectancy, and, hence, by inference and definition, we argue that this must also be the case with well-being. Secondly, we find through statistical analysis that healthcare has as much impact on life expectancy as does absolute income, leading us to theoretically examine the appropriate income cost for access to healthcare if life expectancy is to improve. And thirdly, by assuming a homogeneous function of life expectancy, we theoretically show how a market oriented healthcare system can exacerbate inequities in life expectancy, and so on well-being. Lastly, we consider some policy implications of those inequities.     

White-nonwhite differentials: Overview and implications

This paper reviews the arguments for maintaining a separate series of statistics for the white and nonwhite populations of the United States; only by maintaining factual data will it be possible to document inequality and discrimination. It then summarizes some white-nonwhite differentials: fertility, life expectancy, health, school attendance, educational attainment, and income. The human, social, and political implications are then reviewed.     

Cumulative Childhood Adversity,Educational Attainment,and Active Life Expectancy Among U.S. Adults

Studies of the early-life origins of adult physical functioning and mortality have found that childhood health and socioeconomic context are important predictors, often irrespective of adult experiences. However, these studies have generally assessed functioning and mortality as distinct processes and used cross-sectional prevalence estimates that neglect the interplay of disability incidence, recovery, and mortality. Here, we examine whether early-life disadvantages both shorten lives and increase the number and fraction of years lived with functional impairment. We also examine the degree to which educational attainment mediates and moderates the health consequences of early-life disadvantages. Using the 1998–2008 Health and Retirement Study, we examine these questions for non-Hispanic whites and blacks aged 50–100 years using multistate life tables. Within levels of educational attainment, adults from disadvantaged childhoods lived fewer total and active years, and spent a greater portion of life impaired compared with adults from advantaged childhoods. Higher levels of education did not ameliorate the health consequences of disadvantaged childhoods. However, because education had a larger impact on health than did childhood socioeconomic context, adults from disadvantaged childhoods who achieved high education levels often had total and active life expectancies that were similar to or better than those of adults from advantaged childhoods who achieved low education levels.     

Do children from small families do better?

The education, income, wealth and satisfaction with life of australians aged 25–54 are examined in relation to the circumstances of their childhood, paying particular attention to variation by number of siblings when growing up. The data are from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survery. Educational attainment, income earned and household wealth tend to be greater for people who grew up in relatively small families. The effect of the number of siblings on educational attainment is greater for females than for males. However the advantages of growing up in a smaller family do not translate into higher levels of satisfaction with life. The implications of the findings for the public debate on fertility and child-related benefits in Australia are discussed, as are the implications of a child-quality-child-quantity trade-off for the explanation of fertility levels in more developed countries.     

Perceived Social Policy Fairness and Subjective Wellbeing: Evidence from China

This study examined the relationship between perceived fairness of social policies and subjective well-being. Two types of policies examined were related to income distribution and social security. Subjective well-being was measured by work and life satisfaction. In addition, subjective well-beings between different income, age, and education groups in the context of perceived social justice were compared. With data from a random telephone survey conducted in Beijing, China among 2,113 respondents, findings from structural equation modeling indicate perceived fairness of social security and income distribution policies are positively associated with subjective well-being. After controlling for income, age, and education, the effect of income distribution fairness on work satisfaction was still positive and significant but had decreased in intensity, while the effect size on life satisfaction had changed little. Effects of social security fairness on both life and work satisfaction were still significant but had changed in different directions after adding demographic variables, in which the effect on life satisfaction had increased, while the effect on work satisfaction had decreased in size.     

Cross-National Variation in Individual Life Satisfaction: Effects of National Wealth, Human Development, and Environmental Conditions

This study adds to the literature on subjective well-being and life satisfaction by exploring variation in individual life satisfaction across countries. Understanding whether and how individual life satisfaction varies across countries is important because if the goal of development is to increase well-being, we must identify the causes of well-being in different national and regional contexts. Using hierarchical linear modeling techniques, I test the hypothesis that individual well-being does vary across countries, and that national wealth, human development and environmental conditions explain this variation. I also test whether the effects of individual characteristics on life satisfaction (including age, marital status, education, income, employment status, and sex) vary across countries, and which country level characteristics explain these variations. Using individual level data from the World Values Survey, I find that there is significant variation in life satisfaction across countries. There is also significant variation in the slopes of individual predictors of life satisfaction across countries and regions. Regional differences in the effects of individual characteristics on life satisfaction explain most of the between country variation in life satisfaction. This indicates that universal development indicators may not adequately reflect differences in life satisfaction across countries, and that development measurements should better reflect regional differences.

The Benefits of Educational Attainment for U.S. Adult Mortality: Are they Contingent on the Broader Environment?

The growing recognition that educational attainment is one of the strongest preventive factors for adult health and longevity has fueled an interest in educational attainment as a population health strategy. However, less attention has been given to identifying social, economic, and behavioral resources that may moderate the health and longevity benefits of education. We draw on theories of resource substitution and multiplication to examine the extent to which the education–mortality association is contingent on other resources (marriage, employment, income, healthy lifestyles). We use data on adults aged 30–84 in the 1997–2006 National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File and estimate discrete-time event history models stratified by gender (N = 146,558; deaths = 10,399). We find that the mortality benefits of education are generally largest for adults—especially women—who have other resources such as employment and marriage, supporting the theory of resource multiplication. Nonetheless, our results also imply that other resources can potentially attenuate the mortality disadvantages (advantages) associated with low (high) levels of education. The findings suggest that efforts to improve population health and longevity by raising education levels should be augmented with strategies that assure widespread access to social, economic, and behavioral resources.     

Longitudinal Analysis of the Domains of Satisfaction Before and After Disability: Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of the onset of disability on life satisfaction and five different domains of satisfaction (health, household income, housing, job, leisure) for German individuals. Particular attention is paid to examining whether individuals can adapt to disability over time before and after its onset in terms of satisfaction. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for the period 1984?C2008, we estimate an innovative fixed-effects model on life satisfaction and each domain of satisfaction for working-age males (aged 21?C58), which allows us to estimate lag and lead effects and thus to test the anticipation and adaptation hypotheses. Although individual obtain complete adaptation to disability in terms of global life satisfaction (5?years after the onset), this adaptation is not complete in all domains of satisfaction. For example, despite the fact that the levels of health satisfaction drop as the individual becomes disabled, after the onset it increases but the levels are lower than those reached before the onset. In contrast, the adaptation is especially faster in the terms of leisure satisfaction (3?years after the onset), household income and housing satisfaction (5?years after the onset in both cases). Our results support the findings obtained in other psychological studies that conclude that the domain of disability extends far beyond health related concerns to encompass the person??s well-being definition of self and social position. Finally, these findings may help policy makers and government to promote social and economic measures and actions lead to increase the scores of global well-being and specific domains of satisfaction of this collective.     

Is education a risk factor or social vaccine against HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa? The effect of schooling across public health periods

Early in the 30-year HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa, epidemiological studies identified formal education attainment as a risk factor: educated Sub-Saharan Africans had a higher risk of contracting HIV/AIDS than their less educated peers. Later demographic research reported that by the mid-1990s the education effect had reversed, and education began to function as a social vaccine. Recent counter-evidence finds a curvilinear pattern, with the association between educational attainment and HIV/AIDS infection changing from positive to negative across the education gradient. To reconcile these inconsistent conclusions, a hypothesis is developed and tested that education at early stages functioned as a risk factor and later functioned (and continues to function) as a social vaccine. We reason that this shift in the direction of the education effect was concurrent with changes in the public health environment in SSA that early on heightened material benefits from educational attainment but later heightened cognitive benefits from schooling. Using the 2003/2004 Demographic Health Surveys from four Sub-Saharan African countries (Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania), we tested this hypothesis (differential effects of schooling) using non-linear regression analysis (probit), identifying the different public health periods and controlling for confounding factors. The results support the hypothesis that the education effect shifted historically in the HIV/AIDS pandemic in SSA as we hypothesized.     

Affluence,Feelings of Stress,and Well-being

Data from the Gallup World Poll highlighted the differential relations between perceived stress, well-being, and wealth at the individual- versus nation-level. At the nation level, stress was a distinct concept from negative affect (NA). It correlated positively with well-being (positive affect, life satisfaction, and domain satisfaction) and wealth (as measured by income, gross domestic product, and modern conveniences). In contrast, NA correlated inversely with well-being and income. Although similar to NA at the individual level, stress showed weaker negative relations with well-being than NA did. In sum, nation-level stress and NA were related in the opposite direction to wealth (and poverty), well-being, and life expectancy. Furthermore, the concept of stress differed at the individual and nation levels. For the former, stress appeared to be purely a negative marker of affective well-being (albeit weaker than other discrete negative emotions); for the latter, it appeared to reflect lifestyle differences that were strongly associated with wealth, and with affective and cognitive well-being to a smaller degree.