Electronic Publication/s

Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2021

Special Issue: Demographic aspects of human wellbeing

Guest editors: Sonja Spitzer, Vanessa Di Lego, Angela Greulich, Raya Muttarak

The 2021 special issue explores demographic perspectives on human wellbeing across time and space. While the idea of relating demographic parameters to wellbeing has been around for a while, a more concrete research agenda on the topic has gained momentum only recently. This volume gives an overview on the latest developments and shows how existing theoretical concepts and methodological tools in demography offer substantial advancements for the study of wellbeing. A large part of the volume is devoted to the challenges of defining and measuring wellbeing, with the most important debate being on whether the focus should be on objective measures like income or subjective definitions of wellbeing such as happiness. The various authors define wellbeing as health and mortality, as income, education or other resources, as happiness or life satisfaction, or a combination thereof, by introducing novel composite indicators. The volume covers wellbeing in historical and contemporary populations, in high- and low-income countries all around the world, also pointing at important research hindrances due to the lack of good-quality data in many regions. Most empirical contributions consider population heterogeneity to study how wellbeing differs by population subgroups and whether some demographic and socioeconomic groups fall behind, thereby providing important policy implications.
Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2021

Details

ISSN1728-4414
ISSN Online1728-5305
ISBN-13978-3-7001-8707-3
ISBN-13 Online978-3-7001-8784-5
Subject AreaSociology and Economics
Quality reviewrefereed - online - print
doi10.1553/populationyearbook2021

Introduction

Debate

Review Articles

Research Articles

David E. Bloom, Victoria Y. Fan, Vadim Kufenko, Osondu Ogbuoji, Klaus Prettner, Gavin Yamey

Going beyond GDP with a parsimonious indicator: Inequality-adjusted healthy lifetime income

page 127

doi: 10.1553/populationyearbook2021.res1.1

Bernhard Riederer, Nina-Sophie Fritsch, Lena Seewann

Singles in the city: Happily ever after?

page 319

doi: 10.1553/populationyearbook2021.res3.2

Data and Trends