Jackeline Velazco

Needs and resources in the investigation of well‐being in developing countries: illustrative evidence from Bangladesh and Peru

The paper offers an analysis of how to operationalize the development goal of promoting well‐being, and provides an exemplar. It focuses on one element of a comprehensive methodology to operationalize empirical research into the social and cultural construction of well‐being in developing countries. This research uses a definition of well‐being that combines objective and subjective dimensions and locates these in the social and cultural relationships of particular societies. We focus here on the Resources and Needs Questionnaire (RANQ), a research instrument specifically developed for this work. This explores the relationships between the resources that households command and the levels of needs satisfaction which household members experience. Preliminary analysis of data for Bangladesh and Peru identifies a number of significant relationships between the distribution of resources that households command and the levels of needs satisfaction they achieve. These outcome results then represent a foundation for further analysis using complementary qualitative and process‐oriented data. JEL Classifications: A12, I32, Z1

Happy Villages and Unhappy Slums? Understanding Happiness Determinants in Peru

Generally, people living in rural areas declare they are happier than people living in cities. This is particularly significant in Peru, a South American country with great levels of inequality and traditionally low levels of reported happiness. This chapter investigates differences in levels of reported happiness between urban and rural Peruvians using regression analysis to test two hypotheses. The first concerns the possibility that urban dwellers are unhappier because of their higher emphasis on social comparison. The second one is related to the different understandings people have about the meaning of happiness. It argues that people living in cities who do not internalise concepts of happiness linked to extrinsic or materialist values will be less happy than those who adapt to a materialist environment. Using data from seven communities in Peru, the study finds that the two hypotheses partially explain the differences in happiness between rural and urban Peruvians. Further research using country-representative data is needed to confirm these findings.

Economic Welfare, Poverty, and Subjective Wellbeing

This chapter explores empirically the relationship between indicators of economic wellbeing (principally household income) and subjective wellbeing (SWB). Past research indicates that at low levels of income the relationship between economic and subjective indicators of wellbeing is positive and strong (e.g., Veenhoven, 1991; Diener et al., 1999; Hirata, 2001). However, economic indicators, such as income, usually explain only a low proportion of the interpersonal variation in SWB: a correlation coefficient of 0.45, in their study of slum dwellers in Calcutta, being the highest encountered in the literature by Biswas-Diener and Diener (2001). Such research has also mostly been restricted to using standard measurses of global happiness or satisfaction with life (Frey and Stutzer, 2002a; 2002b; Kingdon and Knight, 2006), and this chapter points beyond this toward analysis of the relationship between economic indicators and a eudaimonic view of wellbeing based on satisfaction with achievement of locally defined goals. We start with a brief review of existing literature linking economic indicators and SWB in Peru. Section 4.2 then presents data on household income, expenditure, and head count poverty incidence in each of the seven research sites. Section 4.3 analyzes the relationship between household economic indicators and reported happiness of a subsample of adults belonging to the same households.

The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs? Agricultural Development in Latin America in the 20th Century

In the last third of the nineteenth century, a large majority of Latin American countries adopted export-led models of growth, mostly based on agricultural exports. In some countries, this strategy produced significant results in terms of economic development but in most of the countries, the strategy was not successful, either because of too slow growth in exports or because linkages with the rest of the economy were very weak and there was no significant growth-spreading effect. After WWII, Latin America turned to a new model of economic development: the import substitution industrialisation (ISI). The ISI policies penalised export-led agriculture. The 1980s and 1990s were characterised by an expansion of adjustment policies and structural reforms. The new strategy consisted of mobilising resources in competitive export sectors, including agriculture. Chapter 13 analyses Latin America’s inability to get the maximum benefit from the changes that have occurred over this period.

Development models, agricultural policies, and agricultural growth: Peru, 1950-2010

Throughout its history, Peru, as a small open economy, has undergone cycles of crisis and recovery, usually linked to fluctuations in the international market. The Peruvian economy has always been an exporter of primary products and an importer of manufactured goods. Chapter 16 has a two-fold aim: to identify the salient characteristics of the development models and policies affecting Peruvian agriculture since the mid-twentieth century, and to identify what effect they have had on agricultural production and productivity based on an estimation of total-factor productivity (TFP) for the 1950–2010 period. Development strategy models have ranged from the diversification of primary exports to import-substitution industrialisation and to the promotion of non-traditional exports, which is the current model.These strategies have determined the outcome for agriculture.