Instructor: Zulaykho Umarova

Discussion 5

SHOKHIJAKHON ASADOV
ECON 2000 5T SP
Survey of Economics
Instructor: Zulaykho Umarova
April 5, 2022

Personal well-being is assessed through four measures: Life satisfaction, feeling the things done in life are Worthwhile, Happiness, and Anxiety. Personal well-being data are presented as both average means and thresholds (very low/low, medium, high/very high); the mean averages provide an overall estimate of personal well-being and the thresholds allow us to look at the distribution of the scores.

Personal well-being estimates and accompanying datasets are published quarterly, based on the most recent year’s worth of data from the APS.
If using local authority data, the most appropriate comparisons to make are progress over time within the same local authority, or across local authorities that share a similar demographic composition to one another; simply ranking local authorities by their numerical scores can be misleading due to several reasons including sample sizes and mode effects.
Core measures of subjective well-being are those for which international comparability is the highest priority. These are measures for which there is the most evidence of validity and relevance, for which the results are best understood, and for which policy uses are most developed. Although the guidelines are intended to support producers of measures of subjective well-being rather than being overly prescriptive, the core measures proposed here are quite specific in content and collection method.
The year-on-year differences are small but statistically significant in each case. The proportion of people giving the highest ratings (scores of 9 or 10 out of 10 for life satisfaction, worthwhile and happiness, and 0 to 1 out of 10 for anxiety) for each measure of personal well-being also increased significantly in financial year ending 2015.
Additionally, the proportions of people reporting personal well-being at the lowest levels (scores of 0 to 4 for life satisfaction, worthwhile and happiness and ratings of 6 to 10 for anxiety) reduced, although the decreases in low well-being were small compared with the improvements in the highest ratings.
This is important because it indicates that while improvements are widespread across the population, they are uneven. The proportion reporting very high personal well-being is growing faster than the proportion reporting low levels is falling. This indicates increasing inequality in personal well-being.
Measuring well-being and progress is a key priority that the OECD is pursuing as part of the Better Life Initiative through various streams of research and on-going work described below. The measuring well-being agenda calls for new and improved statistical measures, aimed at filling the gap between standard macroeconomic statistics that sometimes are used as proxies of people’s welfare and indicators that have a more direct bearing on people's life. The OECD has and continues to develop a number of guidelines and frameworks to support those interested in developing better well-being metrics and is advancing the measurement agenda through various work shown below.