Proxy For Well-being Research Articles

Wellbeing at the Edges of Ownership: The Impacts of Housing Tenure, Social Capital, and Institutions

This paper presents a three-country analysis of the relationship between housing, indicators of social capital, and life satisfaction (a proxy for wellbeing) using cross-sectional data from national surveys in Australia, the UK and the US. Addressing a key policy debate we construct, for each jurisdiction, models of life satisfaction as a function of housing and social capital, with a view to better targeting policy interventions to achieve wellbeing outcomes. First, we show that the wellbeing premium associated with homeownership remains resilient despite housing market instability early in the 21st century. Second, we find that while social capital is an important independent positive influence on life satisfaction, its effect is weaker than that of housing tenure. Third, we include two measures of housing risk (repayment risk and investment risk). These position mortgagors on a continuum across the edges of owner-occupation, placing them closer to, or further from, the ‘ideal’ of outright ownership. The impact of these measures varies across the three countries, raising questions about the way life satisfaction at the edges of ownership may be shaped by institutional forces.

Greater social network complexity mitigates pandemic-related negativity

Having strong, diverse social relationships is tightly linked to myriad physical and mental health benefits by mitigating the negative impacts of adverse events. The COVID-19 pandemic brought increased uncertainty and changes to our social lives that reduced the spread of COVID-19 (e.g., social distancing), but also likely impacted emotional well-being. We investigated how one of these changes – changing social networks – relates to emotional bias (a proxy for well-being), specifically one’s tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli as positive or negative (i.e., valence bias). Participants ( N = 614) categorized the valence of clearly (e.g., angry and happy expressions) and ambiguously valenced stimuli (e.g., surprised expressions), and were asked about their social network before and during the pandemic. Compared to before the pandemic, participants reported a decrease in overall network size ( p < .001) and number of embedded networks (i.e., a measure of network complexity represented by number of areas of social activity; p < .001). In a model with all three social network dimensions (size, complexity, diversity), network complexity uniquely predicted valence bias ( p = .02). Specifically, participants with greater social network complexity during the pandemic showed a more positive bias. Further, participants that did not experience a pandemic-related reduction in network complexity were protected from pandemic-related increases in negativity ( p < .001). In other words, having a more complex social network could act as a protective factor against adverse outcomes in times of uncertainty.

Examining the Factor Structure of a Subjective Well-Being Measure in a Medical Student Sample

Accreditation standards for U.S. medical education programming require that training programs promote trainee wellness and well-being, although constructs such as psychological distress and depression commonly serve as proxies for well-being. A direct measure of subjective well-being would be invaluable to inform programming efforts to promote medical trainees’ well-being and advance the study of the well-being construct itself. This study investigated the structural validity of subjective well-being as measured by the Well-Being Scale in a sample of 548 osteopathic medical students. Results of the confirmatory factor analysis indicated that subjective well-being is best represented by a bifactor model with a general subjective well-being factor and five well-being domain factors and that allowing items from two well-being domains to cross load brought significantly stronger model-data agreement. Some scale items were respecified to become pure indicators of the general well-being factor based on their patterns of factor loadings, and the final bifactor model brought an acceptable fit. To our knowledge, this study is among the initial research efforts to investigate the use of a holistic subjective well-being instrument in the medical student population. The use of a direct, multidimensional subjective well-being measure is foundational to medical education programs’ efforts to promote well-being, future investigations of predictors of medical students’ well-being, and longitudinal analyses of medical students’ well-being over their matriculation.

Household Income Diversity: An Antidote to Poverty Eradication in Developing Economies

The acceptance of economic variability by households is seen as a key step towards escaping the poverty cycle. The purpose of the study is to examine the link between household wellbeing and income diversity empirically. Using instrumental variable static panel model regression, we investigate the implications of probable indigeneity caused by selection bias. The study made use of the waves from the Uganda National Panel Survey. The findings show that having a diversity of revenue sources greatly enhances household wellbeing. The results also showed that residing in the eastern or northern areas had a negative impact on welfare compared to living in the center region, and that household welfare is substantially predicted by the education of the household head. The subjective aspect of wellbeing could not be fully described by the methodologies used in this study. Future research could think about using a practical strategy. The use of both primary and secondary data for additional investigation might provide astounding findings. The research study adds to the welfare literature by showing the influence of income variety on household welfare as defined by poverty status and consumer spending, in contrast to other studies that simply examined expenditure as a proxy for welfare. By demonstrating how income variety improves household wellbeing using a sample of homes in Uganda, a developing economy, the study furthers the welfare theory

Improving Household Welfare Through Income Diversity

Accepting income diversity by households is regarded as a crucial step in breaking the vicious cycle of poverty. The study aims to investigate the empirical relationship between household welfare and income diversity. We examine the effects of potential endogeneity brought on by selection bias using instrumental variable static panel model regression. The Uganda National Panel Survey waves were used in the study. The results demonstrate that having a variety of sources of income significantly improves household welfare. The findings further revealed that household welfare is significantly predicted by the household head's education while living in the eastern or northern regions has a negative effect on welfare relative to living in the central region. The methods employed in this research were unable to adequately describe the subjective nature of welfare. Future studies may consider taking a pragmatic approach. The utilization of both primary and secondary data for further research may reveal amazing results. In contrast to past research that only used expenditure as a proxy for welfare, the research study advances the literature on welfare by demonstrating the impact of income diversity on household welfare as measured by poverty status and consumption expenditure. The study extends the welfare theory by showing how diversity of income enhances household welfare using a sample of households in Uganda, a developing economy.

Synthetic indicators to analyze work-related physical and psychosocial risk factors: evidence from the European Working Conditions Survey

In modern workplaces, alongside physical, chemical, and biological hazards, other risks are linked to the organisation of work and to the nature of the work itself. This paper investigates the association between workers’ well-being and both psychosocial and physical risk factors at work proposing a synthetic measure suitable to generate insights on well-being at work and on individual risk factors. Exploiting data from the European Working Conditions Survey, we select as response variable the “self-assessed health”. As this proxy of well-being is measured on a Likert scale, Ordered Probit analyses are run, and respondents’ profiles are illustrated. Then, a Principal Component Analysis is carried out to build two synthetic measures summarising the selected risk determinants. The resulting first principal components are subsequently used as synthetic indicators in further, simplified, Ordered Probit models to explain the impact of different sets of risks on perceived health. Such a methodology allows for a straightforward interpretation of the results since many different risk drivers are replaced by two continuous synthetic indicators. Our findings, in line with existing research, confirm that both types of risk factors do exert a substantial impact on workers’ health, although the psychosocial determinants seem to be more prominent.

What is wellbeing for rural South African women? Textual analysis of focus group discussion transcripts and implications for programme design and evaluation

Policy makers’ ultimate goal is to deliver the highest possible level of population welfare. Economists investigate the effect of socio-economic dimensions on wellbeing using unidimensional measures of life satisfaction or happiness as proxies for welfare. However, social psychologists have shown that wellbeing is a much broader construct and that an intervention may have opposite effects on its components. Unidimensional measures may hide these patterns. Most literature focuses on high-income countries. The growing evidence from low- and middle-income countries also largely relies on standard unidimensional measures. This study tests the validity of this reliance by exploring the wellbeing construct of South African women, quantitatively analysing textual data from focus group discussions to investigate whether unidimensional measures are appropriate in this context. It provides evidence against the indiscriminate use of unidimensional wellbeing measures. Cluster and correspondence analysis of the transcripts show that relevant domains of women’s wellbeing include relations with others, autonomy, and a perception of control over their environment (environmental mastery). Results also reveal that participants have a relational view of themselves, distinct from the individuated view predominant in the US and Europe and the collectivist view found in East Asia. Such relational self-perception modifies study participants’ wellbeing construct in ways that are important for policy implementation and evaluation. For example, women’s autonomy and environmental mastery rely on shared peer-identity to redefine rules and meet challenges. Wellbeing measures for policy evaluation would benefit from incorporating these insights to meaningfully measure progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 3 on ‘good health and wellbeing’ in South Africa and other contexts that exhibit similar concepts of wellbeing.

Investigating the performance of agricultural sector on well-being: New evidence from Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso’s economy is based mostly on agriculture. Despite this sector’s substantial contribution to economic development, the majority of the population continues to live below the poverty line, and poverty is even more pronounced in rural areas where subsistence farming is the main source of income. The present research intends to assess the effects of the agriculture sector on the wellbeing of society in Burkina Faso from 1970 to 2017 using a Vector Autoregressive technique. The results reveal that agriculture sector has an adverse influence on well-being in both short- and long-run when household consumption expenditure (HCE) used as a proxy of well-being. While this sector uncovered a productive impact on well-being measured by education (EDU) in both short- and long-run. An increase in the agriculture value-added induces an extend in the short-run and a reduction in the long-run of life expectancy (LEXP) in the Burkina Faso. The variance decomposition results show that the agricultural sector will contribute about 57.33% to explain variation in the household final consumption expenditure while industry and service sectors will only contribute about 2.03% and 4.42% respectively. However, the value-added from the industrial sector affects significantly (47.37%) the variation of life expectancy at birth in Burkina Faso. In addition, Granger’s causality test has demonstrated a unidirectional causal impact from agriculture value-added to household income. The same causal links were also discovered, respectively from the agricultural and service sectors to life expectancy. This study emphasizes the necessity to concentrate stakeholders including farmers, policymakers and experts on agri-business strategies and programs, investment in farm commodity processing in the growing country concerned. The farmers may thus change from subsistence to agri-business, therefore accelerating the industry’s growth and creating more jobs for the working population and diversifying the country's household income sources.

Impact of irrigation on welfare and vulnerability to poverty in South African farming households

Many empirical studies have documented the role of farm management practices such as irrigation in reducing poverty and improving household well-being. Few studies, however, have looked at the impact of irrigation farming on poverty vulnerability and the welfare of rural farming household. This study examined the factors that influence farmers’ participation in irrigation farming, as well as how it affects farmers' food consumption expenditure per capita (proxy for welfare), poverty gap index, poverty severity and poverty vulnerability. The study's data was collected from farming households in the northern and coastal parts of the Eastern province of South Africa. The endogenous switching regression (ESR) model was employed in the study to account for selection bias that could be caused by both observed and unobserved household factors. The empirical result shows that gender, household size, educational attainment, crop diversification, and market outlet among others influenced farmers' decision to practice irrigation farming. Farmers engaging in irrigation farming boosted their food consumption per capita by 44%, while non-participants would have increased their consumption expenditure per capita by 23% if they had participated. Moreover, participating farmers reduced their poverty gap index by 20% and poverty severity by 22%, whereas non-participating farmers could have reduced their poverty gap index and poverty severity by 5% and 17%, respectively had they engaged in irrigation farming. Participation in irrigation farming also reduced poverty vulnerability by 25%, while non-participants may have reduced poverty vulnerability by 3%. The findings suggest that enhancing farmers' access to irrigation is crucial to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to eradicate poverty in all its manifestations everywhere.

Eco-Capabilities as a Pathway to Wellbeing and Sustainability

Eco-Capabilities is an AHRC funded project situated at the intersection of three issues: a concern with children’s wellbeing; their disconnect with the environment; and a lack of engagement with arts in school curricula. It builds on Amartya Sen’s work on human capabilities as a proxy for wellbeing, developing the term eco-capabilities to describe how children define what they feel they need to live a fully good human life through environmental sustainability, social justice and future economic wellbeing. A total of 101 children aged 7–10 from schools in highly deprived areas participated in eight full days of arts in nature practice. The study drew on arts based research methods, participatory observations, interviews and focus groups with artists, teachers and children. Findings suggest that arts in nature practice contributed towards eight (eco-)capabilities: autonomy; bodily integrity and safety; individuality; mental and emotional wellbeing; relationality: human/nonhuman relations; senses and imagination; and spirituality. This was facilitated through four pedagogical elements: extended and repeated arts in nature sessions; embodiment and engaging children affectively through the senses; ‘slowliness’, which envelops children with time and space to (re)connect; and thoughtful practice, which facilitates emotional expression. We suggest that, through these elements, arts in nature practice supports children’s wellbeing, and guides them towards a more entangled relationship with nature and a clearer understanding of themselves as part of it, thereby motivating them to take better care of it.

Does Rural Tourism Really Improve Public Welfare? An Empirical Evidence from Desa Wukirsari

This study examines the impact of rural tourism on the public welfare of Desa Wukirsari. We use monthly income and consumption expenditure as a proxy for welfare and categorize it based on people's jobs into five categories, i.e., craftsman, entrepreneur, laborer, employee, and farmer. We conduct a non-parametric test for the data because of the violation of the normality assumption. The results show that both the people's income and consumption expenditure increase as of Desa Wukirsari became rural tourism. We also find the same conclusions based on people's jobs. These results empirically prove that the welfare of the people of Desa Wukirsari improved after rural tourism. The people of Desa Wukirsari can utilize their resources to improve their quality of life.

The relationship between of international migration, income per capita and unemployment rate in Indonesia

International migration has become an interesting issue in recent decades as globalization has become increasingly widespread as a form of openness in the world economy. This economic openness also results in changes in life socially, economically and culturally more dynamically. One of the dynamics of socio-economic conditions is shown by the increasingly flexible and dynamic international migration that occurs in several countries. Some underlying factors include conditions of income and unemployment. This study aims to analyse the response of migration when there is dynamics in per capita income as a proxy for welfare and unemployment as a proxy for employment conditions. VAR analysis is a method to see these responses through the IRF. The results of the analysis showed a significant response from migration as a result of the shock that occurred in both variables and with OLS estimation, both of these variables have a significant impact on influencing Indonesia's international migration flow. These is a signal that the main factor causing international migration is dominant due to the dynamics of income and labour market conditions (unemployment) in Indonesia. Although in other cases, migration also has a positive impact on some parties such as increasing income per capita for migrants, reducing unemployment and increasing the country's foreign exchange, but this condition also needs proper supervision and management. This must also be considered from various other aspects such as demographic conditions related to the age structure of the population and availability of employment to create a balance in the labour market

Can Local Policies Reduce the Gap between ‘Centers’ and ‘Inner Areas’? The Case of Italian Municipalities’ Expenditure

This study analyzes the links between Italian inner area municipalities’ expenditure and per capita incomes, considered as a proxy of well-being. Inner areas are territorial contexts characterized by a significant distance from the centers, the main supply poles of essential services. Following a top-down approach, the paper at first demonstrates the existence of a global convergence process in per capita incomes, with a faster rate of convergence in inner areas with respect to centers; then, attention is focused on local administrations’ policies and their impact on incomes in Italian inner areas. The paper gives a twofold contribution to the debate about the implementation of territorial cohesion policies: (a) on one side, public expenditure data are considered for the first time in an econometric model regarding Italian inner areas; (b) on the other side, the reference territorial subdivision is the lowest possible, giving the opportunity to investigate the changes in well-being at the finest scale.

Faecal Glucocorticoid Metabolites and H/L Ratio are Related Markers of Stress in Semi-Captive Asian Timber Elephants.

Simple SummaryAnimals are kept in captivity for various reasons worldwide. Throughout its range countries, the Asian elephant is used for various purposes, with a significant proportion of the remaining population working as draft and transport animals in the timber industry. However, captivity can also lead to compromises in welfare that need to be quantified for successful intervention. A key way of assessing an animal’s well-being in wildlife and zoo biology is to measure its stress. Previous studies have found positive, negative, or no relationship between two commonly used measures of stress: stress hormones and the ratio of two types of white blood cells—heterophils to lymphocytes. Our study is one of the first to show a positive and consistent link between these two measures in semi-captive Asian elephants from Myanmar, irrespective of sex, age, or environmental context. Our results show that using the heterophil/lymphocyte ratio from blood smears on-site may offer a potentially cheaper and faster way to determine stress than measuring faecal glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations in the laboratory.Animals are kept in captivity for various reasons, but species with a slower pace of life may adapt to captive environments less easily, leading to welfare concerns and the need to assess stress reliably in order to develop effective interventions. Our aim was to assess welfare of semi-captive timber elephants from Myanmar by investigating the relationship between two physiological markers of stress commonly used as proxies for welfare, faecal glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations (FGM) and heterophil/lymphocyte ratios (H/L), and link these measures to changes in body condition (determined by body weight). We further assessed how robustly these two markers of stress performed in animals of different age or sex, or in different ecological contexts. We measured FGM concentrations and H/L ratios between 2016 and 2018 from 316 samples of 75 females and 49 males ranging in age from 4 to 68. We found a positive and consistent link between FGMs and H/L ratios in Asian elephants, irrespective of their sex, age, or ecological context. Our results will help to inform managers of (semi-) captive elephants about using heterophil/lymphocyte ratio data from blood smears on site as a potentially cheaper and faster alternative to determining stress than measuring faecal glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations in the laboratory.

Examining the Relation between Purpose in Life and Self-Reported Health in Community and Inpatient Populations

The goal of the present study was to examine whether the relation commonly found between purpose in life and well-being occurs regardless of the population being assessed (community vs. inpatient) when the presence of somatic symptoms is used as a proxy for well-being. A total of 145 adults participated in the study (psychiatric patients, N = 28; healthy community adults, N = 117). Statistical analyses were first conducted to control for the effects of the observed differences in age and gender between samples. Results showed a significant relation between purpose in life and perceived health even after controlling for population. In both community and inpatient populations, purpose in life correlated with fewer somatic concerns. We discuss the benefits of incorporating a sense of directedness with prevention and treatment purposes.

Resilience from the ground up: how are local resilience perceptions and global frameworks aligned?

Numerous resilience measurement frameworks for climate programmes have emerged over the past decade to operationalise the concept and aggregate results within and between programmes. Proxies of resilience, including subjective measures using perception data, have been proposed to measure resilience, but there is limited evidence on their validity and use for policy and practice. This article draws on research on the Decentralising Climate Funds project of the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters programme, which supports communities in Mali and Senegal to improve climate resilience through locally controlled adaptation funds. It explores attributes of resilience from this bottom‐up perspective to assess its predictors and alignment with food security, as a proxy of well‐being. We find different patterns when comparing resilience and the well‐being proxy, illustrating that the interplay between the two is still unclear. Results also point to the importance of contextualising resilience, raising implications for aggregating results.

Towards a Sustainable Happiness Model for UAE: Lessons from Latin America

Traditionally studies on Happiness have been using income as a proxy for wellbeing and quality of life using GDP to measure progress of nations. We need to understand here that while income is an objective measure, Happiness is a subjective measure. One of the key criticisms leveled against GDP is that it does not take into account sustainability. Sometimes growth may be there but not achieved through sustainable thereby risking the future. On the flip side economic growth itself may not be sustainable in some cases. So can we depend on economic factors alone to be happy? In the past decade or so more and more countries are looking at the “Beyond GDP “agenda. in 2011 the OECD developed a framework for measuring wellbeing that can reflect and support development of measurement frameworks on a national level. there are a sizeable number of Latin American countries scoring consistently high on the Happiness index despite a number of socio economic issues. The recently published World Happiness report (2018) suggests that this is not a mere coincidence. It is based on the fact that Happiness in Latin America has social foundations. UAE lists in the top 20 countries with a happiness index of 6.774. (Source: World Happiness ranking 2015-17).This is the first ever attempt to superimpose the Latin American happiness model on the UAE local community to arrive at a sustainable happiness model for them.

Welfare and food security response of animal feed and water resource scarcity in Northern Ethiopia

The scarcity of grazing and water for an animal has a negative effect on household welfare and food security either by affecting livestock production directly, affecting crop or off-farm income due to labor reallocation or through its direct impact on time leisure consumption.The economic impacts of resource (grazing and water) scarcity on welfare are undermined. Thus, a better understanding that is derived from the factual evidence is required. The first objective of this paper is to explore the link between natural resource scarcity and per capita food consumption expenditure (PCFE) as proxy for welfare and food security followed by the second objective of analyzing whether this effect is uniform across all quantile groups and there is gender differential effect using distance and shadow price as resource scarcity indicators. The paper used a relatively unique data set from a randomly drawn 518 sample farmers in Northern Ethiopia. To address our first objective, we employ the IV two-stage least square estimation for welfare and probit model for food security drawing on non-separable farm household model.Our estimates show that about 48% of the households were food secure while 52% were food insecure. Our results confirmed the theoretical prediction that resource scarcity affects household PCFE and food security adversely as predicted by the downward spiral hypothesis. The results indicate that animal feed and water scarcity have an important impact on welfare and food security. As expected, in aggregate, reducing time spent searching for water per day leads to an increase in PCFE and food security. Similarly, a decrease in time wastage for searching grazing increase PCFE and food security respectively, and an increment of PCFE and food security is achieved by a reduction in crop residue transporting time per day.The gender differential analysis signals that increasing resource scarcity results in low PCFE and food security, with the male are considerably likely to have less food consumption expenditure and being food insecure more as compared to female households. The total impact of time spent searching for water, grazing, and transporting straw on per PCFE is − 0.142%, − 0.102%, and − 0.092%, respectively, and decreasing reaching time to a water, grazing, and straw source by 0.6 min will increase PCFE by 354 ETB, 254 ETB, and 229 ETB for the median household. Depending on results from the quantile regression, the effect of water and feed scarcity is not uniform across the food consumption distribution.

Does the post-socialist past determine the relationship between GDP per capita and education? Evidence from Europe

Education is one of the key factors of economic growth. Despite the huge amount of researches investigating the relationship between education and GDP as a proxy of well-being, to the best of our knowledge, none of these studies examined a group of post-socialist countries comparing with not-post-socialist countries. This paper aims to fill this gap. We examine the correlation between growth and education with panel data evidence for 18 post-socialist (PS) countries and 16 developed market economies (DME) over the 1990–2014 period. The goal of this paper is to test two hypotheses: (i) The relationship between GDP per capita and tertiary education’s enrolment rate is stronger in the post-socialist countries than in other countries. (ii) In the post-socialist countries, the relationship between GDP per capita and tertiary education’s enrolment rate is stronger than the relationship between GDP per capita and any other level of education. Correlation analyses confirmed both hypotheses. Our findings suggest that the patterns of relationship between GDP and measures of tertiary education are different for PS and DME countries and would be interesting to observe when and how the gap between the patterns disappears.

Economic Implication of Grazing and Water Resource Scarcity on Households’ Welfare and Food Security in Tigrai, Ethiopia

In this paper, I have explored the link between grazing and water resource scarcity and per capita food consumption expenditure as a proxy for welfare and food security using distance and shadow price as a resource scarcity indicator in Northern Ethiopia based on a unique data set for 518 sample farmers. To address my objectives, I employed an IV 2SLS model for estimating welfare and probit for analyzing food security, drawing on a separable farm household model. My results confirmed the theoretical prediction that grazing and water affect households’ welfare and food security adversely, as predicted by the downward spiral hypothesis.