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Studies into the relation between subjective perceptions of individuals and objective economic conditions have usually resulted in ambiguous empirical findings. Whilst most studies perceive subjective welfare as being operationalized by indicators of happiness or life satisfaction, we narrow the approach to an economic domain of subjective well-being—perceptions of poverty. We argue that our approach better reflects the economic dimension, as the former may include numerous non-economic domains. We use a case study of two countries—Czechia and Slovakia—which underwent early economic transition as a common state in 1989–1992, then became independent states in 1993, after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. We base our findings on three historical data sets covering a period from around the end of the communist era to the early years after the split, and recent data from EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (2005–2016). Despite initially small differences in subjective poverty levels in socialist Czechoslovakia, a considerably larger drop in economic performance during the transition period in Slovakia than in Czechia resulted in a sharp widening of the subjective poverty gap. The recent data suggests that, despite a high degree of actual economic convergence of Slovakia and Czechia, the gap in subjective perceptions of poverty is declining at a remarkably slower pace. We argue that relatively fast economic growth is not necessarily associated with a commensurate decline in subjective poverty perceptions. Our results thus support the Easterlin Paradox, although we substitute happiness by an economic dimension of subjective well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a cross-national comparison on the economic performance and income distribution of OECD countries. Discussion on the issues of growth, income distribution, poverty, unemployment, risk and social spending; Utilization of income mobility indexes; Impact of unemployment on inequality and poverty; Use of a dynamic model of household incomes to forecast the potential costs of the unification in Germany.

In this paper, results of applying the subjective definition of poverty, introduced by Goedhart et al. (1977), in the U.S. and the Netherlands are compared. This definition focuses on the monetary amounts which people consider necessary to make ends meet for their households as provided in response to the Minimum Income Question (MIQ). National data from both countries in the early 1980s are analyzed. In regressions of reported minimum income, corrections are made for the omission of income components and selective non-response. For the first time the relationship between fixed expenditures and the MIQ is examined. Factors significantly related to reported minimum income include household income, household composition, age, education, sex, region, fixed expenditures, and whether the household experienced recent income changes. The income elasticity appears to be smaller in the U.S. than in the Netherlands, while the effects of other socioeconomic factors are greater. On average, the resulting subjective income thresholds are above official poverty lines, but more so in the U.S. than in the Netherlands. Whether thresholds based on answers to MIQs should be regarded as poverty lines remains open to question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]