Living Standards And Social Well Being

Too many of the world’s citizens face impoverished living standards. The economic and financial crises have made matters worse. The viewpoint of Living Standards and Social Well-Being is that the fundamental objective for an economy is provisioning, not simply efficiency. The chapters in this volume examine how economies across the globe come to understand what constitutes a living and how they can improve living standards, including balancing paid work with family life and civic responsibility. The authors provide historical, theoretical, and empirical studies of moving economies at the macro level and households at the micro level toward improved living standards. It is argued that achieving well-being and decent living standards, through work and welfare state policies, is a social responsibility. Such improvements could be delivered through basic income policies, family support, job guarantees, decent work, shorter work weeks, and support from social welfare. These issues are important for economics and the other social sciences and in particular for social economics. This book was published as a special issue of the Review of Social Economy.

Too many of the world’s citizens face impoverished living standards. The economic and financial crises have made matters worse. The viewpoint of Living Standards and Social Well-Being is that the fundamental objective for an economy is provisioning, not simply efficiency. The chapters in this volume examine how economies across the globe come to understand what constitutes a living and how they can improve living standards, including balancing paid work with family life and civic responsibility. The authors provide historical, theoretical, and empirical studies of moving economies at the macro level and households at the micro level toward improved living standards. It is argued that achieving well-being and decent living standards, through work and welfare state policies, is a social responsibility. Such improvements could be delivered through basic income policies, family support, job guarantees, decent work, shorter work weeks, and support from social welfare. These issues are important for economics and the other social sciences and in particular for social economics. This book was published as a special issue of the Review of Social Economy.

How’s Life? charts whether life is getting better for people in 37 OECD countries and 4 partner countries. This fifth edition presents the latest evidence from an updated set of over 80 indicators, covering current well-being outcomes, inequalities, and resources for future well-being.

In 150 years Italy transformed itself from a poor and backward country into one where living standards are among the highest in the world. In Measuring Wellbeing, Giovanni Vecchi provides an innovative analysis of this change by drawing on family accounts that provide engaging insights into life and are the "micro" data that create the foundations for the "macro" picture of variations and fluctuations in the development of Italy. Vecchi provides a nuanced account of the changes. He emphasizes that the concept of wellbeing is multidimensional and must include non-monetary aspects of life: nutrition, health and education, as well as less tangible elements such as freedom or the possibility to exercise one's political rights. The book deals with this polyhedral nature of wellbeing. Among the insights are that Italians succeeded in combining growth with equity, but that the gap between the North and South did not narrow; the while longevity has increased, education has not improved as much as it could have; and that for close to three decades, Italy's virtuous path has come to a halt: the wellbeing of the Italian people is at the crossroads between progress and decline. Measuring Wellbeing engagingly combines a unique dataset and an innovative statistical method that can be adapted to other countries.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Equity is an abstract concept covering philosophical issues such as fairness and social justice, making its definition and measurement complex. This volume tackles these complexities head-on. The book is enriched with many empirical analyses and provides a comprehensive analysis of equity ranging from concepts and measurements to empirical illustrations and policy implications. After an extensive discussion on equity in the introduction, this volume begins with a chapter on well-being where the concepts of functioning and capability are discussed. This is followed by a few chapters on what an equitable distribution is and how equity can be measured. The volume then provides a definition and a methodology to measure equitable growth, examining the relationship between growth, inequality, and poverty. It also presents various empirical illustrations and country-specific experiences with three country case studies which assess whether publicly provided health and education services are equitable in developing Asia, examining the extent to which these social services favor the poor as well as the policy challenges to a more equitable delivery of these services. Finally, these country studies provide evidence–based policy recommendations to improve equity in social service delivery in developing countries. Achieving social equity has long been an important policy goal. There are relatively few studies on equity. This book aims to help fill this gap with an in-depth analysis of the issues associated with equity, covering its concept, measurement, and policy practices and implications.

Designed to be accessible to noneconomists, it relegates technical details to appendixes."--BOOK JACKET.

This is a study about perceptions of well-being. Its purpose is to investigate how these perceptions are organized in the minds of different groups of American adults, to find valid and efficient ways of measuring these percep tions, to suggest ways these measurement methods could be implemented to yield a series of social indicators, and to provide some initial readings on these indicators; i.e., some information about the levels of well-being perceived by Americans. The findings are based on data from more than five thousand Americans and include results from four separate representative samplings of the American population. One of the ways our research is unusual is that it includes a major methodological component. Typical surveys involve a modest effort at instru ment development, the application of the instrument to a group of respondents, and an analysis of the resulting data that mainly describes the people studied. Our work, however, was implemented in a series of sequential cycles, each of which consisted of conceptual development, instrument design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Ideas and findings generated in prior cycles affected the design of subsequent cycles.