What Buys Happiness? Analyzing Trends in Subjective Well-Being in 15 European Countries, 1973-2002 Trends in life satisfaction are examined across 15 European countries employing a modified version of Kendall’s Tau. Analyses show that GDP growth relative to growth in the preceding period is a significant determinant of the trends; the same holds for the growth in life expectancy while the conte...

Although gross domestic product (GDP) is not intended to be a measure of societal welfare, it is often used as such. One shortcoming as a welfare measure is that it fails to account for the non-marketed value of natural resource flows. The difference between societal welfare and GDP is labelled the ‘welfare gap’. A model that accounts for both market and non-market income flows from natural cap...

T he pace and scale of China’s economic transformation have no historical precedent. In 1978, China was one of the poorest countries in the world. The real per capita GDP in China was only one-fortieth of the U.S. level and one-tenth the Brazilian level. Since then, China’s real per capita GDP has grown at an average rate exceeding 8 percent per year. As a result, China’s real per capita GDP is...

A range of monthly series are currently available giving indications of short-term movements in output in the UK. The main aim of this paper is to suggest a formal and coherent procedure for grossing these monthly data up to represent the whole of GDP. Although the resultant estimates of GDP would be worse than those obtained by direct measurement, they should be more satisfactory than simply m...

We conduct both an approximate Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) and an exact Bayesian analysis to incorporate break date uncertainty of the mean growth rate into the trend-cycle decomposition of U.S. real GDP. Our results suggest a structural break in mean growth rate of U.S. real GDP in 1970s. Comparing to the models assuming fixed break date, we find higher uncertainty in the posterior density ...

What is the information content of news-based measures of sentiment? How are they related to aggregate economic fluctuations? I construct a sentiment index by measuring the net amount of positive expressions in the corpus of Economic news articles produced by Reuters over the period 1987 2013 and across 12 countries. The index successfully tracks fluctuations in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at ...

In 2009, Canada ranked ninth among OECD countries with a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $46,243,1 a measurement generally used to compare societies’ standards of living. That same year, our main trading partner, the United States, ranked third with a per capita GDP of $56,109—21.3% higher than the figure for Canada. It is generally acknowledged that an increase in a country’s standa...

Scattered works by political scientists since the 1970s have reported that Democratic presidents have compiled stronger economic records than their Republican counterparts: economic growth has been higher, unemployment lower, and inequality has fallen during Democratic administrations while the opposite outcomes have occurred under Republican presidents. Recently, however, Campbell has vigorous...