Good Governance and National Well-being

The paper was prepared by John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, Shawn Grover and Shun Wang incollaboration with Mario Marcel, Martin Forst and Tatyana Teplova.This paper has three main objectives. The first is to review existing studies of the links between goodgovernance and subjective well-being. The second is to bring together the largest available sets of nationallevelmeasures of the quality of governance, and to assess the extent to which they contribute to explainingthe levels and changes in life evaluations in 157 countries over the years 2005-2012, using data from theGallup World Poll already analysed in some detail in the World Happiness Report 2013. The thirdobjective is to use subjective well-being research to suggest ways in which governance can be changed soas to improve lives in all countries, as measured by peoples’ own evaluations.         The paper starts with a summary of the evidence and policy implications. There follow the four mainsections of the paper, a statistical appendix containing a broad range of data and results, and an extensiveannotated bibliography of empirical literature linking good governance and subjective well-being.      

OECD Working Papers on Public Governance

Good Governance and National Well-being

What Are the Linkages?