Can investments in social protection contribute to subjective well-being?: A cross-country analysis

Alexandre Kolev and Caroline Tassot
Additional contact information
Alexandre Kolev: OECD
Caroline Tassot: OECD

No 332, OECD Development Centre Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: Subjective well-being has in recent years been recognised as a goal of development that captures non-monetary or subjective dimensions of well-being. The body of evidence on the individual and societal determinants of subjective well-being is growing, but the literature remains in its infancy as to the role of social protection despite important policy implications. The objective of this paper is to explore the relationship between investments in social protection (as a proxy for the level of social protection services received by the population) and individuals’ evaluative and experienced well-being. This paper thus provides new evidence on the relationship between social protection investments and subjective well-being based on a worldwide sample including 38 countries and covering low-, middle- and high-income countries. Furthermore, we study potential channels explaining this relationship by considering the effect on potential beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries as well as distributional effects. Le bien être subjectif est depuis quelques années reconnu comme un but du développement qui permet de capturer les dimensions non-monétaires –ou subjectives –du bien-être. La littérature sur les déterminants du bien être au niveau individuel et sociétal s’est beaucoup enrichie. Cependant peu d’études se concentrent sur le rôle particulierde la protection sociale pour le bien être individuel, malgré leurs implications importantes en termes de politique. L’objectif de ce document est d’explorerla relation entre les investissements dans la protection sociale (en tant que proxy pour le niveau des services sociaux dont bénéficie la population) et le bien être individuel, évaluatif ainsi qu’émotionnel. Ce document présente de nouvelles estimations sur cette relation entre ces investissements et le bien être dans un échantillon global de 38pays incluant des pays à bas, moyen, et haut revenu. Nous étudions également la question des dynamiques expliquant cette relation, notamment en évaluant cette relation pour les potentiels bénéficiaires et non-bénéficiaires de programmes de protection sociale ainsi qu’en estimant les effets distributionnels.

Keywords: government spending; social inclusion; social protection; subjective well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H53 I30 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-05-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/5jlz3k7pqc5j-en (text/html)

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:oec:devaaa:332-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Development Centre Working Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().