IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/pseptp/halshs-02973078.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Taking a wellbeing years approach to policy choice

Author

Listed:
  • Jan-Emmanuel de Neve

    (University of Oxford)

  • Andrew E. Clark

    (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research, LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science)

  • Christian Krekel

    (CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research, LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science)

  • Richard Layard

    (CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research, LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science)

  • Gus O’donnell

    (CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research, LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science)

Abstract

Every day, policy makers must decide whether a policy is desirable. They do so by examining its impact on a range of outcomes. But the problem is how to aggregate these disparate outcomes. For example, as covid-19 cases rise again, some lockdown measures are gradually being reintroduced across the UK. These policy choices will lead to outcomes that are good (such as fewer deaths from covid-19, less commuting, better air quality) and some that are bad (unemployment, income losses, loneliness, domestic abuse). How can policy makers aggregate these disparate effects in order to arrive at an overall assessment? To do so requires a "common currency" with which to measure all the effects. The currency we propose is the change in years of human wellbeing resulting from the policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Jan-Emmanuel de Neve & Andrew E. Clark & Christian Krekel & Richard Layard & Gus O’donnell, 2020. "Taking a wellbeing years approach to policy choice," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) halshs-02973078, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-02973078
    DOI: 10.1136/bmj.m3853
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Adler, Matthew D. & Dolan, Paul & Henwood, Amanda & Kavetsos, Georgios, 2022. "“Better the devil you know”: Are stated preferences over health and happiness determined by how healthy and happy people are?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 303(C).
    2. Matthew D Eisenberg & Alexander McCourt & Elizabeth A Stuart & Lainie Rutkow & Kayla N Tormohlen & Michael I Fingerhood & Luis Quintero & Sarah A White & Emma Elizabeth McGinty, 2021. "Studying how state health services delivery policies can mitigate the effects of disasters on drug addiction treatment and overdose: Protocol for a mixed-methods study," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(12), pages 1-16, December.
    3. Skarda, Ieva & Asaria, Miqdad & Cookson, Richard, 2022. "Evaluating childhood policy impacts on lifetime health, wellbeing and inequality: Lifecourse distributional economic evaluation," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 302(C).
    4. Strong, Peter & Shenvi, Aditi & Yu, Xuewen & Papamichail, K. Nadia & Wynn, Henry P. & Smith, Jim Q., 2023. "Building a Bayesian decision support system for evaluating COVID-19 countermeasure strategies," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 113632, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    5. Thoma, Johanna, 2021. "Weighing the costs and benefits of public policy: on the dangers of single metric accounting," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 112689, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-02973078. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Caroline Bauer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.