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During 2006, the Gallup Organization conducted a World Poll that used an identical questionnaire for national samples of adults from 132 countries. I analyze the data on life satisfaction (happiness) and on health satisfaction and look at their relationships with national income, age, and life-expectancy. Average happiness is strongly related to per capita national income; each doubling of income is associated with a near one point increase in life satisfaction on a scale from 0 to 10. Unlike most previous findings, the effect holds across the range of international incomes; if anything, it is slightly stronger among rich countries. Conditional on national income, recent economic growth makes people unhappier, improvements in life-expectancy make them happier, but life-expectancy itself has little effect. Age has an internationally inconsistent relationship with happiness. National income moderates the effects of aging on self-reported health, and the decline in health satisfaction and rise in disability with age are much stronger in poor countries than in rich countries. In line with earlier findings, people in much of Eastern Europe and in the countries of the former Soviet Union are particularly unhappy and particularly dissatisfied with their health, and older people in those countries are much less satisfied with their lives and with their health than are younger people. HIV prevalence in Africa has little effect on Africans' life or health satisfaction; the fraction of Kenyans who are satisfied with their personal health is the same as the fraction of Britons and higher than the fraction of Americans. The US ranks 81st out of 115 countries in the fraction of people who have confidence in their healthcare system, and has a lower score than countries such as India, Iran, Malawi, or Sierra Leone. While the strong relationship between life-satisfaction and income gives some credence to the measures, as do the low levels of life and health satisfaction in Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union, the lack of correlations between life and health satisfaction and health measures shows that happiness (or self-reported health) measures cannot be regarded as useful summary indicators of human welfare in international comparisons.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/nber_w13317.pdf?abstractid=1008811&mirid=1&type=2

Income, Aging, Health and Wellbeing Around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960854-6.pdf?code=lancet-site

Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health

During 2006, the Gallup Organization conducted a World Poll that used an identical questionnaire for national samples of adults from 132 countries. I analyze the data on life satisfaction and on health satisfaction and look at their relationships with national income, age, and life-expectancy. Average life satisfaction is strongly related to per capita national income; each doubling of income is associated with a near one point increase in life satisfaction on a scale from 0 to 10. Unlike most previous findings, the effect holds across the range of international incomes; if anything, it is slightly stronger among rich countries. Conditional on national income, recent economic growth makes people less satisfied with their lives, improvements in life-expectancy make them more satisfied, but life-expectancy itself has little effect. In most countries, except the richest, older people are less satisfied with their lives. National income moderates the effects of aging on self-reported health, and the decline in health satisfaction with age is much stronger in poor countries than in rich countries. In line with earlier findings, people in much of Eastern Europe and in the countries of the former Soviet Union are particularly dissatisfied with their lives and with their health, and older people in those countries are much less satisfied with their lives and with their health than are younger people. HIV prevalence in Africa has little effect on Africans’ life or health satisfaction; the fraction of Kenyans who are satisfied with their personal health is the same as the fraction of Britons and higher than the fraction of Americans. The US ranks 88th out of 120 countries in the fraction of people who have confidence in their healthcare system, and has a lower score than countries such as India, Iran, Malawi, Afghanistan or Angola . While the strong relationship between life-satisfaction and income gives some credence to the measures, as do the low levels of life and health satisfaction in Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union, the lack of correlations between life and health satisfaction and health measures shows that self-assessed life or health evaluations cannot be regarded as useful summary indicators of human welfare in international comparisons.

/pdf/income-health-and-well-being-around-the-world-evidence-from-4hog5ek2uf.pdf

Income, health, and well-being around the world: evidence from the Gallup World Poll.

Previous research has shown that major life events can have short- and long-term effects on subjective well-being (SWB). The present meta-analysis examines (a) whether life events have different effects on affective and cognitive well-being and (b) how the rate of adaptation varies across different life events. Longitudinal data from 188 publications (313 samples, N = 65,911) were integrated to describe the reaction and adaptation to 4 family events (marriage, divorce, bereavement, childbirth) and 4 work events (unemployment, reemployment, retirement, relocation/migration). The findings show that life events have very different effects on affective and cognitive well-being and that for most events the effects of life events on cognitive well-being are stronger and more consistent across samples. Different life events differ in their effects on SWB, but these effects are not a function of the alleged desirability of events. The results are discussed with respect to their theoretical implications, and recommendations for future studies on adaptation are given.

/pdf/subjective-well-being-and-adaptation-to-life-events-a-meta-2k3b9a6u7u.pdf

Subjective well-being and adaptation to life events: a meta-analysis.

We apply the Day Reconstruction Method to compare unemployed and employed people with respect to their subjective assessment of emotional affects, differences in the composition and duration of activities during the course of a day, and their self-reported life satisfaction. Employed persons are more satisfied with their life than the unemployed and report more positive feelings when engaged in similar activities. Weighting these activities with their duration shows, however, that average experienced utility does not differ between the two groups. Although the unemployed feel sadder when engaged in similar activities, they can compensate this by using the time the employed are at work in more enjoyable ways. Our finding that unemployment affects life satisfaction and experienced utility differently may be explained by the fact that people do not adjust their aspirations when becoming unemployed but face hedonic adaptation to changing life circumstances, triggered by the opportunity to use the time in a way that yields higher levels of satisfaction than working.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/26649/1/597827885.PDF

Dissatisfied with life, but having a good day: time-use and well-being of the unemployed

The average driver in US metropolitan areas endured 27 hours of traffic delays in 2000, a rise from 7 hours in 1980. Traffic delays are considerably worse in many other countries than in the United States, and in developing countries urban traffic congestion is increasing with alarming rapidity. Economists have been advocating congestion pricing as the way to deal with urban traffic congestion for fifty years; but today, even after some successes, congestion pricing is encountering considerable political resistance. Active consideration of more microscopic policies that attack the problem at the scale at which actual policy decisions are made is advocated by the authors of this report. They argue that Microscopic models, rather than macroscopic models that are too simplified and too aggregated, will lead to the analysis of a wider and more creative range of policies, at least some of which should work well and be politically acceptable. The authors illustrate the themes of the book, after developing them, by examining some areas of urban transport policy that have been neglected by the macroscopic approach. Included are the encouragement of bicycling, downtown parking policy, the staggering of work hours by dominant employers, and the use by medium-sized cities of a "multimode" ticket that charges cars entering the city center a toll equal to the transit fare. By no means will the reorientation of urban transport analysis that they advocate eliminate traffic delays, but it should alleviate urban traffic congestion by speeding up the adoption of a richer, more flexible, and ultimately more effective set of policies to alleviate urban traffic congestion.

Alleviating Urban Traffic Congestion

This survey reviews the recent literature on the double-dividend hypothesis of environmental taxes and discusses some extensions of the standard model such as the distributional consequences and the importance of the non-separability assumption between consumption goods and environmental quality for the optimal design of environmental policies. Turning to a model with imperfect labour markets we then show under which circumstances environmental taxes on polluting inputs in production and on polluting consumption goods can reap a second dividend in the form of an employment dividend and discuss the welfare implications. Finally, we turn to international aspects of environmental taxation. When environmental problems are tied to the use of exhaustible resources, resource-consuming countries can appropriate resource rents at the cost of resource-owning countries by levying environmental taxes strategically.

/pdf/the-double-dividend-hypothesis-of-environmental-taxes-a-2gydksce4m.pdf

The double-dividend hypothesis of environmental taxes: a survey

https://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/fachbereich/vwl/schoeb/forschung/forschung_dateien/alleviatingUnemployment.pdf

Alleviating unemployment:: The case for green tax reforms

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in their life satisfaction when they retire. These results are robust to controlling for changes in other life circumstances and suggest that retiring is associated with a switch in the relevant social norms that causes an increase in identity utility for the formerly unemployed. This is supportive of the idea that, by including identity in the utility function, results from the empirical life satisfaction literature can be reconciled with the economic theory of individual utility.

/pdf/changing-identity-retiring-from-unemployment-482xgiuako.pdf

Ronnie Schöb

Papers

Dissatisfied with life, but having a good day: time-use and well-being of the unemployed

Alleviating Urban Traffic Congestion

The double-dividend hypothesis of environmental taxes: a survey

Alleviating unemployment:: The case for green tax reforms

Changing Identity: Retiring from Unemployment