An eternal motive of human existence is the search for guidance.While values and beliefs retain their high relevance, today's enlightened societies also tend to rest their aspirations and decisions on the actual facts and on a sober assessment of possible courses of events emerging from...

The capabilities approach developed by Sen (1985) and others has been highly influential in development circles and is increasingly being thought of as a theoretical framework suitable for understanding and measuring quality of life issues in high income contexts (Anand et al (2009), EU (2009))....

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...