Valuing Health Conditions - Insights from Happiness Surveys across Countries and Cultures

Carol Graham, Lucas Higuera Jaramillo and Eduardo Lora

No 4635, Research Department Publications from Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department

Abstract: This paper assesses the effects of different health conditions on happiness. Based on a large data set for Latin America, the effects of different conditions are examined across age, gender, and income cohorts. Anxiety and pain have stronger effects than physical problems, likely because people can adapt better to one-time shocks than to constant uncertainty. The negative effects of health conditions are very large when compared to the effects of income on happiness. While higher peer income typically elicits envy, better peer health provides positive signals for life and health satisfaction. Nonetheless, health norms vary widely across countries. The results suggest that the life satisfaction approach applied to surveys of health may contribute to better health expenditure and policy decisions.

Keywords: Happiness; Health economics; Public policy; Surveys (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 I18 I30 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=I ... me=pubIDB-WP-100.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=IDB-WP-100&pub_file_name=pubIDB-WP-100.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=IDB-WP-100&pub_file_name=pubIDB-WP-100.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:wpaper:4635

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Department Publications from Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library (bid-library@iadb.org).