This is an attempt to view the relationships involving education and income as forming a system, and one that can generate a poverty trap.  The setting is rural China, and the data are from a national household survey for 2002, designed with research hypotheses in mind.  Enrolment is high in...

Using a South African data set, the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well-being. Much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts. We find that comparator income – measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster - enters the...

The empirical literature on the economics of happiness has grown rapidly, and much has been learned about the determinants of subjective well-being.  Less attention has been paid to its normative implications.  Taking China as a case study, this paper first summarises empirical results on the...