quot;Local Currency Backed by Local Laborquot; is a concept paper that suggests that a rural third-world community's prosperity could be improved by companies of men and/or women issuing currency backed by their labor. The paper offers a suggestion about how labor-backed currency could be...

There is no significant relationship between the improvement in happiness and the long term rate of growth of GDP per capita. This is true for three groups of countries analyzed separately - 17 developed, 9 developing, and 11 transition - and also for the 37 countries taken together. Time series...

Based on point-of-time comparisons of happiness in richer and poorer countries, it is commonly asserted that economic growth will have a significant positive impact on happiness in poorer countries, if not richer. The time trends of subjective well-being (SWB) in 13 developing countries,...

We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora from millions of digitized books for the USA, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. While existing measures go back at most to the 1970s, our measure goes back at least 200...

Using new comprehensive data and tools from the Global Consumption and Income Project (GCIP), covering most of the world and more than five decades, we present a portrait of the changing global distribution of consumption and income and discuss its implications for understanding inequality and...

Interest in the emergence of a global middle class has resulted in a number of attempts to identify and enumerate who belongs to it. Current research provides wildly different estimates about the size and evolution of the global middle class because of a lack of consensus on appropriate...

This paper examines how regionalization in the face of globalization has affected financial development in the context of banking system efficiency in Africa. Results which are robust to financial system efficiency and growth-led-finance nexus reveal that in the post-regionalization era: (1)...

When we talk of fighting the problem of poverty, the only answer is to create broad base economic growth by involving large number of women that will not only bring the changes in individual but also in family, community and institutions. They must be empowered to think independently and...

The answer is that people's evaluations of their income situation are based on different considerations when the economy is expanding and when it is contracting. When, in the course of economic growth, incomes generally are rising, evaluations tend to be dominated by "social comparison" - what...