Mierniki dobrobytu. Polska na tle wybranych krajów świata
Measuring Welfare – Poland and Selected Countries of the World

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents the debate in the literature over aggregative measures of economic welfare, and investigates the differences in how economic welfare is evaluated in various countries, depending on the measurement applied. The first part of the article looks at the debate over the various ways of measuring economic welfare. The second presents a comparative analysis of welfare, measured on the basis of a few indicators, between Poland and other countries. The literature overview indicates that alternative, and perhaps better measurements then GDP per capita, are characterised by one major weakness – the arbitrary selection of partial measures. The result is that it is difficult to use the values obtained from various sources in empirical research. Moreover, it is hard to find long enough time series other than GDP per capita and HDI that present other than conventional aspects of welfare, which in turn indicate the quality of life. Comparison of values of various welfare measurements shows a different picture of welfare in the world. Conventional measures, such as GDP per capita and HDI, overestimate the Euro-Atlantic culture countries, especially EU-15, OECD, and UCJNA. Measurement with heterodox theoretical background evaluates as relatively higher those countries with a relatively lower level of economic development, as measured with conventional measurements.

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