This paper examines a famous puzzle in social science. Why do some nations report such high happiness? Denmark, for … Italy do relatively poorly. Yet the explanation for this ranking - one that holds even after adjustment for GDP and socio …

, evaluations tend to be dominated by "social comparison" - what is happening to the incomes of others. An increase in the incomes … of others undercuts the tendency for happiness to grow with an increase in one's own income, and happiness remains fairly …, and the greater the shortfall, the less one's happiness. There is thus an asymmetry in the psychological roots of income …

. This entry also briefly discusses: recent history of well-being measurement; what makes people better off in theory; the …

Component Analysis. Our analysis shows that BLI increases with GDP only for poor countries, extending the Easterlin Paradox to … the quality of life measurement; that good performances in BLI are not necessarily due to a high efficiency of the whole …

Life satisfaction is increasingly recognised as a desirable individual outcome. Policy attention with respect to child … that child life satisfaction is not associated with household income (poverty), or with a set of new material deprivation …

Despite the burgeoning happiness economics literature, scholars have largely ignored explorations of how individuals or … international well-being rankings - demonstrate that efficiency is lower among the unemployed, divorced/separated, widowed, the old …. This paper provides the first evidence from an international panel concerning the issue of whether higher well-being levels …

-being ; happiness ; satiation ; basic needs ; Easterlin paradox …

Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does not capture many dimensions that imply a "good … life," such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of easy interpretation and can … preserves the advantages of per capita GDP, but also includes health and equality. We propose a new parsimonious indicator to …