Empowerment Rights and Happiness Gap in Post-socialist Countries

Anna Lewczuk ()

Central European Economic Journal, 2018, vol. 5, issue 52, 270-295

Abstract: In this paper, we contribute to the debate on life-satisfaction gap between the citizens of post-socialist countries of Europe and Asia and their highly developed OECD counterparts, by examining the influence of de jure and de facto respect for empowerment rights. We mainly focus on the measure of rights protection called de jure - de facto rights protection gap. The empowerment rights included in the analysis are: the freedom of association, the freedom of expression, the freedom of religion, the freedom of foreign movement. Our results imply that government’s respect for these rights plays the role in diminishing happiness gap. We base the conclusions on an empirical study conducted on the sample of more than 59,000 observations. The data used for the study consist of World Values Survey database (waves 3–6) and a number of socio-economic indicators for 44 countries.

Keywords: empowerment rights; economic analysis of human rights; happiness gap; de jure and de facto rights protection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 K38 P37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ceej-2018-0023 (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:vrs:ceuecj:v:5:y:2018:i:52:p:270-295:n:19

DOI: 10.1515/ceej-2018-0023

Access Statistics for this article

Central European Economic Journal is currently edited by Anna Matysiak

More articles in Central European Economic Journal from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().