American Economic Review Vol. 106 No. 9 2016

Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time

Charles I. Jones¹; Peter J. Klenow²

¹ Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305, and NBER (e-mail: ) · ² Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, and NBER (e-mail: )

Abstract

We propose a summary statistic for the economic well-being of people in a country. Our measure incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality, first for a narrow set of countries using detailed micro data, and then more broadly using multi-country datasets. While welfare is highly correlated with GDP per capita, deviations are often large. Western Europe looks considerably closer to the United States, emerging Asia has not caught up as much, and many developing countries are further behind. Each component we introduce plays a significant role in accounting for these differences, with mortality being most important.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20110236

Volume

106

Issue

9

Pages

2426-2457

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

APA 7 MLA 9 Chicago (author–date) Harvard Elsevier Harvard (JFE, JBF…) The Accounting Review Academy of Management American Marketing Association INFORMS (Management Science) Copy citation Copied ✓