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From The Editor's Desk (December 2012)Tony Addison This year has rushed by at speed. For UNU-WIDER it’s been a year of big successes. We will have published some 110 working papers by the...
Tony Addison This year has rushed by at speed. For UNU-WIDER it’s been a year of big successes. We will have published some 110 working papers by the...
Tony Addison A visit to Buenos Aires in September provided a good vantage point to look at the euro zone’s deepening crisis. Angle readers will recall...
Using survey data from rural Vietnam, this paper documents a statistically significant, positive effect of self-employment in farming on subjective well-being. Wage workers are less happy than farmers across a range of different types of wage jobs...
The presence of European colonial powers in Africa has left a long-lasting legacy that has severely impacted their development trajectories. But what are the lingering effects of colonization on economic performance, in particular with regard to...
Summary measures of human well-being are increasingly used to compare and monitor performance within and across countries. The UNDP's Human Development Index (HDI) is one of a number of measures which have done much to refocus attention on the...
The study examines welfare changes in China during the reform period (1978- ) by analysing various welfare indicators, the causes of change, and the shifting models. It provides an empirical case to the general debate over the relationship between...
Every person desires some level of inner fulfilment at different stages of life and this could come from a combination of several factors including material and resource acquisition and social prestige. The challenge, however, is whether happiness...
Understanding the relationship between food insecurity and subjective evaluation of well-being is critical in designing social welfare policies, especially in developing countries. Surprisingly, literature on the topic is scarce. This study adopted...
Using a unique survey data set this paper documents a positive effect of self-employment in farming on subjective well-being. This direct effect is only partly offset by negative, indirect effects working through income and other variables. These...
Sen’s influential work on human development has led economists to explore new areas that have become increasingly important for human well-being. In particular, Sen emphasizes the importance of the ‘freedom to choose’. Freedom, however, is not always...
This paper establishes the principles which should govern the welfare and inequality analysis of heterogeneous income distributions. Two basic criteria—the ‘equity preference’ condition and the ‘compensation principle’—are shown to be fundamentally...