We use several well-being measures that combine average income with a measure of inequality to undertake international, intertemporal, and global comparisons of well-being. The conclusions emerging from the analysis are that our well-being measures drastically change our impression of levels of...

This paper explores a new theoretical and empirical approach to the assessment of human wellbeing, relevant to current challenges of social fragmentation in the presence of globalization and technological advance. We present two indexes of well-being - solidarity (S) and agency (A) - to be...

Over the last decades, research in behavioural economics has demonstrated that individual welfare (utility), as relevant for economic decision making, depends not only on absolut but also on distributional aspects. Moreover, evidence is gathering that something similar holds for aggregate...

We study how measures of socioeconomic health inequality inform about welfare inequality. We argue that transfers of either income or health from a better off to a worse off individual should reduce welfare inequality. Lacking an objective measure of individual welfare, we suggest that such a...

Physical stature is used as a proxy for the biological standard of living in the two Germanies before and after unification in an analysis of a cross-sectionalsample (1998) of adult heights, as well as among military recruits of the1990s. West Germans tended to be taller than East Germans...

Since measures of well-being are meant to be an exercise in documentation, but also a tool for policies and priorities, we suggest an operative way to use them. We evaluate both technical and social efficiency of countries in producing the Better Life Index (BLI) objectives. To assess the...

We provide a critique of the standard methodology which bases welfare comparisons between households on deflating household income and consumption by an equivalence scale. We argue that this leads to support for tax/transfer policies that significantly disadvantage low to middle in-come...

This paper studies the distributional consequences of a systematic variation in expenditure shares and prices. Using European Union Household Budget Surveys and Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices data, we construct household-specific price indices and reveal the existence of a pro-rich...

This paper focuses on the role of institutions in the fight against poverty and inequality. Our view of institutions encompasses formal rules designed by polity (including those in the legal and economics sphere such as rules of property rights, contracts and liabilities) as well as informal...