The Welfare State and Human Well-Being Around the World: A Cross-National Analysis

Does the welfare state affect human well-being outside the developed OECD world? For decades scholars have assessed the impact of the welfare state on a variety of outcomes, largely economic and social (for reviews see Kenworthy, Social Forces. 77:1119–1039, 1999; Kenworthy & Pontusson, Perspectives in Politics. 3:449–471, 2005; O’Connor, Review of Behavioral Economics. 4:397–420, 2017). While more recent focus has shifted to the impact of welfare programs on human well-being, this literature has suffered from several shortcomings. First, there has been an overriding focus on developed core OECD countries. Second, the primary outcome of interest has been on subjective well-being (life satisfaction, happiness). In this paper, we try to address these shortcomings to some extent. First, we extend the analysis to a wider and more diverse sample of countries. Second, we focus on a range of aspects of human well-being beyond life satisfaction. Third, we rely on a new measure of welfare impact that goes beyond mere overall spending—expert survey based coding of social security protections from the global Quality of Government 2021 data set. We find that in our sample of countries, this welfare measure exerts a positive and significant effect on a range of well-being outcomes. Implications for the study of the welfare state and well-being are discussed.