An objective approach on well-being : case of OECD countries

• Autor(a) principal: Cunha, Daniel Brochado da
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/40610
• topic: Data envelopment analysis; Well-being; Happiness; Linear regression analysis; Bem-estar; Felicidade; Regressão linear; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Well-being is a multidimensional concept that depends on factors such as financial conditions, health, education, and so on. This thesis develops an objective approach to well-being, aiming to create a composite indicator based on objective variables, which facilitates the comparison of well-being levels between countries and throughout time. In fact, OECD countries will be evaluated on their well-being levels, while observing their evolution between 2018 and 2020. In addition, we will assess how the idiosyncrasies of the countries contribute to higher well-being levels. Besides that, this manuscript contains the analysis of more subjective well-being indexes such as the Better Life Index (BLI), created by the OECD, which contain some limitations regarding the comparison of countries throughout time. The final goal relies on comparing the objective approach on well-being to well-known subjective indexes such as BLI, while evaluating the results of each approach. The use of DEA allowed for a more accurate and objective evaluation, where each country was able to optimize its well-being score based on traits in which they performed relatively better, while being benchmarked against the best performing countries. Two DEA scenarios were considered, the first consisting in allowing weights of the indicators to assume the value that maximizes the performance of the country, while the second considered restrictions to the variables’ weights. Our findings illustrate that the results of the objective well-being index are highly correlated with more subjective approaches.