This paper explores the extent and nature of gender differences, by age, in household health expenditure allocation. Using South African data, we adopt a hurdle methodology, constructing a sequence of decision stages (reporting sickness, consulting medical practitioner, incurring positive medical expenditure, and the conditional amount of expenditure) in order to examine all these possible chan...

This paper examines regional differences in subjective well-being (SWB) in Germany. Inferential statistics indicate a diminishing but still significant gap between East and West Germany, but also differing levels of SWB within both parts of Germany. The observed regional pattern of life satisfaction reflects macroeconomic fundamentals, where labour market conditions play a dominant role. Differ...

The direction of the causality between energy consumption and income is an important issue in the fields of energy economics, economic growth, and policies toward energy use. The seminal work on the relations between energy consumption and aggregate income is Kraft and Kraft (1978). An extensive literature has followed on, including Akarca and Long (1980), Yu and Choi (1985), Erol and Yu (1988)...

This paper addresses the extent to which there is an intergenerational transmission of mental health and subjective well-being within families. Specifically it asks whether parents’ own mental distress influences their child’s life satisfaction, and vice versa. Whilst the evidence on daily contagion of stress and strain between members of the same family is substantial, the evidence on the tran...

Many common multidimensional indices take the form of a ‘composite indicator’ or a weighted average of several dimension-specific achievements. Rankings arising from such an index are dependent upon an initial weighting vector, and any given judgment could, in principle, be reversed if an alternative weighting vector were employed. This paper examines a variable-weight robustness criterion for ...

This chapter focuses on the Indian experience with dietary changes, their nutritional implications, and policy response to alleviate nutritional deprivation. We review the evidence on nutrient intake and dietary changes, particularly the downward shift in calorie, protein and other nutrient intake over the period 1993–2004 and provide a demand based explanation of this shift. We report on eatin...

Impact of Income Growth and Economic Reform on Nutrition Intake in Urban China: 1986-2000 Although urban China has experienced a rapid income growth over the last twenty years, nutrition intake for the low income group declined in the 1990s. Does this imply a zero or negative income elasticity for the low income group? This paper examines this issue using large representative sample of repeated...

Happiness and Economic Growth: Does the Cross Section Predict Time Trends? Evidence from Developing Countries Based on point-of-time comparisons of happiness in richer and poorer countries, it is commonly asserted that economic growth will have a significant positive impact on happiness in poorer countries, if not richer. The time trends of subjective well-being (SWB) in 13 developing countries...

In the modern welfare state, people who cannot make a living usually receive financial assistance from public funds. Accordingly, the so-called social work norm against living off other people is violated, which may be the reason why the unemployed are so unhappy. If so, however, labour market concepts based on the notion of promoting low-paid jobs that are subsidised if necessary with addition...

A growing empirical literature uniformly claims that prosocial (or moral) behavior increases happiness. Previous causal evidence, however, focuses on short-term effects and non-choice data. We test the link between prosocial behavior and happiness in a novel high-stakes paradigm that provides a comprehensive, dynamic perspective on the pattern of derived happiness. In our longitudinal study, ea...