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Enhancing Poverty-Abatement Programs: a Subjective Well-Being Contribution

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Abstract

This paper questions the assumption used in designing social policies that raising people’s income automatically translates into greater well-being. Based on a subjective well-being approach and a representative survey from Costa Rica the paper shows that there is substantial dissonance in the classification of persons as poor and as being in well-being deprivation. The existence of dissonances leads to the conceptualization of different trajectories out-of-poverty and into well-being. Public policies oriented towards the abatement of income poverty can have a greater impact on people’s well-being if they recognize the complexity of human beings and acknowledge that their programs affect satisfaction in all domains of life. The paper states that public policy should not only be concerned with getting people out of income poverty, but also with placing them in a life-satisfying situation. The paper also discusses strategies that could improve poverty-abatement programs.

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Notes

  1. For an in depth discussion of basic needs see Doyal and Gough (1991) and Gasper (2007).

  2. Frank (2005, p. 70) suggests that “people might have been able to spend their money in other ways that would have made them happier, yet for various reasons did not”.

  3. There is no person without circumstances; thus, the alternative for a person is not to get rid of all cultural biases, parents, dependencies, values, goals, childhood experiences, and so on; but to substitute them for different ones.

  4. In this way, even if it sounds paradoxical, it can be said that the subjective well-being approach avoids the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the so-called objective indicators of well-being. It deals with the well-being of a person as she is, and not as someone else thinks she ought to be.

  5. The author expresses his gratitude to the Merck Foundation for a grant that financially supported the incorporation of a subjective well-being group of questions in the survey.

  6. The author has found that results do not substantially differ when life satisfaction is treated as a cardinal rather than as an ordinal variable. Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters (2004) also show that there are no substantial differences when satisfaction is treated either as a cardinal or as an ordinal variable.

  7. The purpose of this investigation is not to study alternative proxies for the definition of income poverty. Rojas (2007b) shows that household per capita income could be a bad proxy for a person’s economic satisfaction because economies of scale at the household level are considerable. In addition, it is also possible for household income not to be a proxy of personal access to economic resources due to intra-household inequality in the distribution of income benefits (Rojas 2006b).

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Acknowledgments

Financial support to run the Costa Rican surveys from the Merck Company Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Merck & Company Inc., Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, USA, is acknowledged.

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Correspondence to Mariano Rojas.

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Rojas, M. Enhancing Poverty-Abatement Programs: a Subjective Well-Being Contribution. Applied Research Quality Life 4, 179–199 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-009-9071-0

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