Hows Life In Latin America Measuring Well Being For Policy Making

Many Latin American countries have experienced improvements in income over recent decades, with several of them now classified as high-income or upper middle-income in terms of conventional metrics. But has this change been mirrored in improvements across the different areas of people’s lives? How’s Life in Latin America? Measuring Well-being for Policy Making addresses this question by presenting comparative evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) with a focus on 11 LAC countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay).

How’s Life? charts whether life is getting better for people in 37 OECD countries and 4 partner countries. This fifth edition presents the latest evidence from an updated set of over 80 indicators, covering current well-being outcomes, inequalities, and resources for future well-being.

This book provides an overview of factors fostering well-being in Latin America and discusses many threats to well-being in the region. The book assesses the current well-being situation in Latin American countries and offers an explanation based on its many drivers, such as family arrangements, kindness and affection of interpersonal relations, economic situation, education regimes, political institutions, poverty, income inequality, crime and violence, and the weakness of political institutions. The book provides a framework to fully understand the drivers behind high well-being, including the challenges and opportunities that public policy faces in the procurement of people’s well-being. The book provides relevant material for policymakers and social scientist interested in the procurement of well-being.

The "quality of life" concept of quality of life is a broad one. It incorporates basic needs but also extends beyond them to include capabilities, the "livability" of the environment, and life appreciation and happiness. Latin America's diversity in culture and levels of development provide a laboratory for studying how quality of life varies with a number of objective and subjective measures. These measures range from income levels to job insecurity and satisfaction, to schooling attainment and satisfaction, to measured and self-assessed health, among others. Paradox and Perception greatly improves our understanding of the determinants of well-being in Latin America based on a broad "quality of life" concept that challenges some standard assumptions in economics, including those about the relationship between happiness and income. The authors' analysis builds upon a number of new approaches in economics, particularly those related to the study of happiness and finds a number of paradoxes as the region's respondents evaluate their well-being. These include the paradox of unhappy growth at the macroeconomic level, happy peasants and frustrated achievers at the microlevel, and surprisingly high levels of satisfaction with public services among the region's poorest. They also have important substantive links with several of the region's realities, such as high levels of income inequality, volatile macroeconomic performance, and low expectations of public institutions and faith in the capacity of the state to deliver. Identifying these perceptions, paradoxes, and their causes will contribute to the crafting of better public policies, as well as to our understanding of why "populist" politics still pervade in much of the region.

Every person aspires to a good life. But what does "a good or a better life" mean? The third edition of How's Life? provides an update on the most important aspects that shape people's lives and well-being: income, jobs, housing, health, work-life balance, education, social connections, civic engagement and governance, environment, personal security, and subjective well-being. It paints a comprehensive picture of well-being in OECD countries and other major economies by looking at people's material living conditions and quality of life across the population. Through a wide range of comparable well-being indicators, the report shows that countries perform differently in the various dimensions of well-being. For instance, low-income countries in the OECD area tend to do very well in subjective well-being and work-life balance, while their level of material well-being is much lower than that of other OECD countries. The report responds to the needs of citizens for better information on well-being and the needs of policymakers to give a more accurate picture of societal progress.

These Guidelines represent the first attempt to provide international recommendations on collecting, publishing, and analysing subjective well-being data.

How was life in 1820 and how has it improved since then? What are the long-term trends in global well-being? Trends in real GDP per capita may not fully reflect changes in other dimensions of well-being, such as life expectancy, educational attainment, personal security, and gender inequality. The product of collaboration between the OECD, the OECD Development Centre, and the CLIOINFRA project, this report represents the work of a group of economic historians to systematically chart long-term changes in the dimensions of global wellbeing and inequality, making use of the best sources and expertise currently available and the most recent research carried out within the discipline. The historical evidence reviewed in the report is organized on ten different dimensions of well-being that mirror those used by the OECD in its report, How's Life? (www.oecd.org/howslife): per capita GDP, real wages, educational attainment, life expectancy, height, personal security, political institutions, environmental quality, income inequality, and gender inequality