The Cost of Well-being

Anna Pettini, Vincenzo Patrizii and Giuliano Resce ()

No 5463, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Since measures of well-being are meant to be an exercise in documentation, but also a tool for policies and priorities, we suggest an operative way to use them. We evaluate both technical and social efficiency of countries in producing the Better Life Index (BLI) objectives. To assess the efficiency test, we use Data Envelopment Analysis integrated with Principal Component Analysis. Our analysis shows that BLI increases with GDP only for poor countries, extending the Easterlin Paradox to the quality of life measurement; that good performances in BLI are not necessarily due to a high efficiency of the whole system; and that social efficiency is the best predictor of development.

Keywords: Better Life Index; Data Envelopment Analysis; quality of life; GDP; welfare; well-being; social efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5463.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Cost of Well-Being (2017)
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:ces:ceswps:_5463

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().