Dimensions of Well-being and the Millennium Development Goals

Well-being and happiness, individually and collectively, is a main indicator of a good life. This paper attempts to implement empirically some of the multidimensional concepts of human well-being by using data from the ‘Pakistan Living Standards Measurement Survey’ 2006-07. Objective well-being index and subjective well-being index are constructed to study regional disparities in the quality of life. The results reveal that most of the top ranked districts are located in the province of Punjab which tends to indicate that Punjab is ahead of other provinces in terms of objective well-being. Sindh and NWFP districts are dominated in the category of lower medium well-being category. At the lower end of the distribution districts of Balochistan emerged in lowest category of well-being. It is observed that Punjab have highest share of population in top category of well-being while population of Balochistan gets major share in lowest category of wellbeing. It is important to note that those districts which have higher achievements in hard facts of well-being, acquire less subjective well-being in term of satisfaction. Districts of Balochistan, with least developed indicators, perception about the quality of life is evident in their lowest level of satisfaction. Since the underlying premise of the MDGs is still the concept of human development, so priorities is needed to concentrate on least developed districts for achieving the MDGs by 2015.