Paul Anand Presents Guest Seminar at World Bank

Professor of Economics Paul Anand was recently invited to present a guest seminar to the Poverty and Inequality programme of the World Bank's Development Economics Group – one of the most influential centres of development research in the world.

In recent years there has been considerable interest in going 'beyond GDP' to develop measures of economic progress more explicitly based on human wellbeing. Inspired in part by Sen's non-utilitarian approach to welfare economics, up till now the work has, however, been constrained by a lack of empirical indicators.

In Wellbeing Measurement and the Operationalisation of Sen's Approach, Professor Anand provided an overview of a series of papers that have sought to operationalise – quantitatively – Sen's proposals, describing the development of new data as well as the use of data across the age range. Drawing on his recent paper Wellbeing Evidence for the Assessment of Progress, written with colleagues Laurence Roope and Andreas Peichl, he presented empirical results based on new data from working-age adults in three high-income countries, along with results on parenting and skill formation using the German socio-economic panel.

In their paper, the authors go on to develop a framework for understanding wellbeing before using it to generate novel data for the USA and UK. In the process, they show that expanding the scope of survey data routinely collected would make it feasible to fully implement Sen's theory, providing a much richer account of the wellbeing outcomes derived from economic progress than is currently the case.