The study of international well-being and its distribution remains focused on income. This paper addresses multidimensional well-being from a capabilities perspective during the last one-and-a-half centuries. Relative inequality (population-weighted) fell in health and education since the late...

Well-being is increasingly viewed as a multidimensional phenomenon, of which income is only one facet. In this paper I focus on another one, health, and look at its synthetic measure, life expectancy at birth, and its relationship with per capita income. International trends of life expectancy...

This paper analyses economic freedom for a sample of 21 OECD countries over the past 170 years on the basis of a new thoroughly revised Historical Index of Economic Liberty (HIEL). Long-term gains in economic freedom reached two-thirds of its potential maximum. The expansion of economic freedom...

Spain experienced economic decline from the 1570s to 1650, recovering gradually thereafter and only reaching its early 1570s per capita income in the 1820s. How did economic decline impact on people's perception of well-being and inequality? We provide an answer based on an unexplored source,...