IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/jnlrbe/105.00000071.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Happiness and Welfare State Policy Around the World

Author

Listed:
  • O'Connor, Kelsey J.

Abstract

There is continual debate focusing on government's role in determining the well-being of its citizens. Should governments expand the generosity of welfare-state policies or reduce their involvement? This question is especially appropriate in less-developed countries with fewer resources to invest. This paper’s findings show welfarestate policy is positively associated with life satisfaction around the world, and the relation holds in subsamples of developed, transition, and less-developed countries. The relation is of similar magnitude as the relation for GDP pc, and is more significant than the relation for quality of governance. The results are based on cross-sectional regressions including 104 countries over the period 2005–2012. Life satisfaction data are from the Gallup World Poll, and welfare-state policy is measured using public social protection expenditures from the International Labor Organization. Previous empirical studies support a positive life satisfaction welfare-state policy relation, but the samples contained few, if any, less-developed countries.

Suggested Citation

  • O'Connor, Kelsey J., 2017. "Happiness and Welfare State Policy Around the World," Review of Behavioral Economics, now publishers, vol. 4(4), pages 397-420, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:now:jnlrbe:105.00000071
    DOI: 10.1561/105.00000071
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/105.00000071
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1561/105.00000071?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Subjective Well-Being; Life Satisfaction; Welfare-State Policy; Quality of Governance; Transition Countries; Less-Developed; Countries;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
    • H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State
    • E60 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - General
    • O11 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:now:jnlrbe:105.00000071. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucy Wiseman (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nowpublishers.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.