Despite increasing acknowledgement that social capital is an important determinant of health and overall well-being, empirical evidence regarding the direction and strength of these linkages in the developing world is limited and inconclusive. This paper empirically examines relationships between social capital and health and well-being-as well as the suitability of commonly used social capital...

Access to credit is a key enabler of modern life. Yet many consumers face factors beyond their control which sometimes render them unable to borrow from mainstream lenders. This paper documents how firm-related factors determine lending thresholds and shape who is, or is not, a credit-worthy customer. The impact of the 2008 economic recession on lending decisions is explored, an aspect that has...

The correlations among indicators of objective well-being, cultural dimensions, and subjective well-being were investigated using Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data from 35 countries. The subjective well-being measures included life satisfaction as well as six positive and six negative indexes of experience. Positive and negative experience scores were subjected ...

BACKGROUND With rapid economic growth and globalization, lifestyle in China has been changing dramatically. This study aimed to describe the male and female adult Chinese population health status. METHODS The Chinese Third National Health Services Survey was conducted in 2003 to collect information about health status and quality of life from randomly selected residents. Of the 193,689 respon...

But the originators of GNP never insisted that this was the only way of measuring an economy. In his Nobel lecture, for example, Kuznets specifically discussed the social implications of growth and argued that: ‘Many of these are of particular interest, because they are not reflected in the current measures of economic growth; and the increasing realization of this shortcoming of the measures h...

In their 30-year update to Limits to Growth, Meadows et al. call for a vision of sustainable development that includes systemic change brought on by new perspectives on the purpose of development, new ways of measuring progress, and changes in social norms. Here, I discuss Meadows et al.‘s work in the context of the literature on sustainable development and well-being as well as the development...

Relative Income, Happiness and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles The well-known Easterlin paradox points out that average happiness has remained constant over time despite sharp rises in GNP per head. At the same time, a micro literature has typically found positive correlations between individual income and individual measures of subjective well-being. This pa...

Recent research has found that richer countries have higher well-being than poorer countries and that the relationship is similar in magnitude to that seen between rich and poor members within countries. However, limited data have constrained previous researchers’ ability to detect whether economic growth within countries leads to greater well-being. Thus the question of whether raising the inc...

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is a reliable source of international data on various areas of economic and social well-being, including health care. It collects data for indicators of quality of care for more than 30 countries. These indicators are used in this report to provide an in-depth look at Canada’s health system compared with health systems in other O...