Essays on Well-being and Quality of Life in Latin America

Abstract

Elevated Latin American well-being rankings are controversial. The dissertation explores the relationship between well-being and other performance measures covering 134 countries in 2011. A correlation analysis tests the relationship across country rankings, such as the Happy Planet Index, the World Development Indicators, the Global Peace Index, and the Corruption Perception Index. The empirical findings suggest that life satisfaction becomes statistically insignificant for the region when correlated with other measures including peace-security, and corruption. The findings also indicate that an increase in per-capita-income, war, and corruption tend to have little to no effect on the given HPI country ranking.