The Consequences of the Pandemic for Subjective Well-Being: Data for Improving Policymaking.

The pandemic has affected people's lives and emotions in profound ways, which governments ignore at their peril. Among the often disregarded consequences of the pandemic, especially in developing countries, are its toll on subjective well-being and its implications for health policymaking. This paper uses a battery of surveys with over 1800 observations collected in 2019 and 2020, which inform on many aspects of subjective well-being before and during the pandemic in Cali, Colombia. The results show a dramatic and widespread reduction in life satisfaction in several dimensions of well-being beyond health, and not just among those directly affected by COVID-19. This analysis focuses on differences in well-being by gender and health status, providing information about gender variances and differences in subjective well-being between those who experienced and those who did not experience physical illness (including the COVID-19 infection) during the pandemic. This analysis aims at contributing to the body of research that studies the consequences of the pandemic for life satisfaction and well-being, in the context of a city experiencing profound social unrest during the pandemic.

Which health conditions cause the most unhappiness?

This paper assesses the effects of different health conditions on happiness. Based on new data for Latin America, we examine the effects of different conditions across age, gender, and income cohorts. Anxiety and pain have stronger effects than physical problems, likely because people adapt better to one-time shocks than to constant uncertainty. The negative effects of health conditions are very large when compared with the effects of income on happiness. And, while higher peer income typically elicits envy, better peer health provides positive signals for life and health satisfaction. Health norms vary widely across countries.

Health perceptions in Latin America.

The influence of cultural patterns and economic conditions on health perceptions in Latin America is studied using the results of the 2007 Gallup World Poll. The differences in health satisfaction between countries around the world have a robust association with variables that may reflect cultural differences rather than with aggregate economic variables or traditional health indicators. Simple health self-rating indicators reveal huge cultural differences in health perceptions in Latin America. However, within each country, differences correlate strongly with individuals' economic and health conditions. Lower-income groups recognize more health problems, but are less tolerant of some of them than the rich.

Health Perceptions in Latin America

This is the first study that uniformly analyzes health perceptions in all of LatinAmerica and tests in a systematic way their relation to economic conditions at thecountry, income group and individual levels. The study uses three types of healthself-assessment questions: i) health satisfaction; ii) health status on a scale of 0-10; and iii) the EuroQol 5D instrument (EQ-5D), which asks about mobility, selfcare,usual activities, pain/discomfort, and anxiety/depression. The empiricalanalysis finds support for the hypothesis that cultural differences betweencountries prevent cross-national comparisons of health perceptions, but it does notfind support for the widely held view that the same applies within countries,presumably because the poor are more tolerant of their health problems.

La legislación laboral en el proceso de reformas estructurales de America Latina y el Caribe / Labor legislation in the process of structural reforms in Latin America and the Caribbean *

INTRODUCCIÓN: En la última década la orientación de las políticas microeconómicas dio un giro extraordinario en América Latina, pero la legislación laboral prácticamente no cambió. El propósito central de este trabajo es mostrar la magnitude de este atraso y señalar que en la mayoría de países se requieren profundas reformas laborales para adecuar la legislación laboral al nuevo contexto de flexibilidad y competencia. OBJETIVOS: Este trabajo está organizado alrededor de tres preguntas: cuáles han sido las reformas estructurales en América Latina, por qué ha habido tan pocas reformas laborales, y cuáles son las principales deficiencias de la legislación laboral actual de la región. De acuerdo con estas preguntas, en la primera sección se resume el avance las reformas en las áreas de política comercial y cambiaria, regímenes tributarios, liberación y regulación financeira y legislación laboral y pensional. La siguiente sección presenta algunas de las posibles razones de economíapolítica por las que no se han adoptado más reformas laborales y por qué las que se han adopta do han sido de naturaleza gradual. CONCLUSIÓN: Obviamente, preguntarse por qué no ha habido más reformas implica creer que sería necessário que las hubiera. La tercera sección está dedicada, justamente, a mostrar que la legislación laboral en América Latina es muy deficiente tanto por razones de eficiencia productiva como de protección a los trabajadores. Uma última sección destaca las conclusiones e implicaciones de política de este análisis.