"Focuses on the role in the policymaking process of new metrics for measuring the effects on individual well-being of institutional, macroeconomic, and policy environments--for example, the effects of macroeconomic uncertainty and lack of access to health insurance--as well as the effects of...

How was life in 1820, and how has it changed since then? This question, which was at the core of How Was Life? Global Well-being since 1820, published by the OECD in 2014, is addressed by this second volume based on a broader perspective. How Was Life? New Perspectives on Well-being and Global...

"How was life in 1820, and how has it improved since then? What are the long-term trends in global well-being? Views on social progress since the Industrial Revolution are largely based on historical national accounting in the tradition of Kuznets and Maddison. But trends in real GDP per capita...

Improves our understanding of the determinants of well-being in Latin America using a broad "quality-of-life" concept that challenges standard assumptions in economics, including those about the relationship between happiness and income. Builds upon new economic approaches related to the study...

This paper uses a partial equilibrium framework to evaluate the relative efficiency, distributional and revenue implications of rice tariffs and targeted transfers in Madagascar, especially in the context of identifying their respective roles for poverty alleviation. Although there are likely to...

The paper presents numerical simulations of various fiscal rules for oil-producing countries. Welfare implications are sensitive to the choice of the social welfare function, initial conditions, and non-oil growth prospects. The distribution of non-oil wealth is important for countries with...

Lucas (2004) asserts that "Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution... The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current...