Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
February 15, 2013
Summary:
In Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) well-being can be defined as the freedom
of choice to achieve the things in life which one has reason to value most for his or her
personal life. Capabilities are in Sen’s vocabulary therefore the real freedoms people have
or the opportunities available to them. In this paper we examine the impact of capabilities
alongside choices on well-being. There is a lot of theoretical work on Sen’s capability
framework but still a lack of empirical research in measuring and testing his capability
model especially in a dynamic perspective. The contribution of the paper is first to test
Sen’s theoretical CA approach empirically using 25 years of German and 18 years of
British data. Second, to examine to what extent the capability approach can explain longterm
changes in well-being and third to view the impact on subjective as well as objective
well-being in two clearly distinct welfare states. Three measures of well-being are constructed:
life satisfaction for subjective well-being and relative income and employment
security for objective well-being. We ran random and fixed effects GLS models. The
findings strongly support Sen’s capabilities framework and provide evidence on the way
capabilities, choices and constraints matter for objective and subjective well-being.
Capabilities pertaining to human capital, trust, altruism and risk taking, and choices to
family, work-leisure, lifestyle and social behaviour show to strongly affect long-term
changes in subjective and objective well-being though in a different way largely depending
on the type of well-being measure used.
Published in
Social Indicators Research
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 110 , p.1 -1
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9978-3
ISSN
3038300
Subject
Notes
Open Access article
#521310