Category : Supplemental Material

As the global community looks for ways to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the share of people in poverty by 2015 from its 1990 level, it cannot afford to ignore the plight of indigenous peoples. Although they make up roughly 4.5 percent of the global population, they account for about 10 percent of the poor—with nearly 80 percent of them in Asia. Turning the situation around will require widespread and sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction, along with strategies to address multiple sources of disadvantage to reach those who need a special lift.

Today, jobs are a critical concern across the globe—for policy makers, the business community, and the billions of men and women striving to provide for their families. As the world struggles to emerge from the global crisis, some 200 million people—including 75 million under the age of 25—are unemployed. Many millions more, most of them women, find themselves shut out of the labor force altogether. Looking forward, over the next 15 years an additional 600 million new jobs will be needed to absorb burgeoning working-age populations, mainly in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Meanwhile, almost half of all workers in developing countries are engaged in small-scale farming or self-employment, jobs that typically do not come with a steady paycheck and benefits. The problem for most poor people in these countries is not the lack of a job or too few hours of work; many hold more than one job and work long hours. Yet, too often, they are not earning enough to secure a better future for themselves and their children, and at times they are working in unsafe conditions and without the protection of their basic rights.

Jobs are instrumental to achieving economic and social development. Beyond their critical importance for individual well-being, they lie at the heart of many broader societal objectives, such as poverty reduction, economy-wide productivity growth, and social cohesion. The development payoffs from jobs include acquiring skills, empowering women, and stabilizing post-conflict societies. Jobs that contribute to these broader goals are valuable not only for those who hold them but for society as a whole: they are good jobs for development.

The World Development Report 2013 takes the centrality of jobs in the development process as its starting point and challenges and reframes how we think about work. Adopting a cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary approach, the Report looks at why some jobs do more for development than others. The Report finds that the jobs with the greatest development payoffs are those that make cities function better, connect the economy to global markets, protect the environment, foster trust and civic engagement, or reduce poverty. Critically, these jobs are not only found in the formal sector; depending on the country context, informal jobs can also be transformational.

The present study investigated the relationship between Subjective Wellbeing (Satisfaction with life (SWL), Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI), Positive Affect (PA) and Negative Affect (NA)), Psychological needs (Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness), Meaning in Life, and Religious Practice. It examined the distributions of these constructs in a large sample of 3,173 subjects (1,638 males and 1,535 females) who participated in the 4 th Algerian Wellbeing Survey. It aimed also to weigh up to what extent they were affected by household income. Finally, it estimated the mediating effect of demographic variables (gender, age, education and location) in the contribution of the studied constructs in each other.

The results indicated that these constructs were significantly inter-correlated and almost similarly distributed in this population. They also showed that they were all negatively affected by low incomes and proved that generally and beyond demographic factors, SWB measures predict better needs satisfaction, meaning in life and religiosity than the opposite direction. The results were discussed on the light of previous international wellbeing research.

It may be relevant to question in the beginning of this chapter whether religion in modern time should be used to classify people and countries so diverse in terms of geography, culture, history, social and political structure, and level of development without committing errors of grave distortions. As a matter of fact, Islamicity , as is used here as a reference, has been accepted for labeling populations in international studies. The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), for instance, founded on September 25,1969, counts 57 member countries spanning East Asia, South Asia, Southern Europe (Turkey), the Middle East, and in many parts of the African continent from North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa. These countries, which are so heterogeneous, have in common not only the sense of belongingness to this great religion and a glorious past but also a harsh reality of dealing with modern life without losing their Islamic identity. This shared religious identity has also been “reinforced by a new shared experience – the penetration, domination, and (in most areas) the departure of European colonialists” (Lewis 1993 , pp. 21–22). Twenty-four Islamic countries did not enjoy freedom from colonization until the second half of the twentieth century. Five of them – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – were freed from the former Soviet Union only recently in 1991. The status of other places such as Palestine, Western Sahara, and Chechnya has not yet been decided. Unfortunately all Islamic countries are considered “third world.”

We live today in an age of sustainababble, a cacophonous profusion of uses of the word sustainable to mean anything from environmentally better to cool. The original adjective—meaning capable of being maintained in existence without interruption or diminution—goes back to the ancient Romans. Its use in the environmental field exploded with the 1987 release of Our Common Future, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. Sustainable development, Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and the other commissioners declared, “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Most of the theoretically based QOL indicators projects can be classified in terms of six major theoretical concepts: (a) socio-economic development (b) personal utility, (c) just society, (d) human development, (e) sustainability, and (f) functioning. I explain the core aspects of these six theoretical paradigms and show how they help guide QOL researchers to select and develop QOL indicators that are significantly and qualitatively distinct. A taxonomy of QOL indicators guided by a given theoretical concept is likely to be very different from others taxonomies guided by different theoretical concepts. Thus, the objective of this paper to explain these theoretical paradigms and show how they guide QOL researchers to select and develop QOL indicators that are significantly and qualitatively distinct.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the history of the social indicators or quality-of-life (QOL) research movement up to today, forecast future developments, and pave the way for future growth. Broadly speaking, we tried to review historical antecedents from the point of view of different disciplines, with specialists in each discipline preparing the basic text and co-authors helping to polish the material into a finished product. Briefly, we begin with an overview of the conceptual and philosophical foundations of our field of research. That is followed by a historical overview of the sociological roots of our field. In the third section, the main contributions from the discipline of economics are reviewed. The fourth section covers a historical overview of research on subjective well-being. Following that, the fourth section covers a historical overview of the literature on health-related quality of life is provided. Next, the history of QOL research from a marketing perspective is reviewed followed by a history from the perspectives of industrial/organizational psychology and management. Finally, we offer some forecasts for future QOL studies that are intended not only to predict what might happen, but to encourage, stimulate and motivate researchers to undertake new initiatives.

Since approximately four decades ago, after diverse branches of knowledge such as psychology and sociology emerged, subjective wellbeing has been an object of study. However, it until recent years that researches related to this topic have had a global boom because they contribute to measure the perceptions of people regarding their situation and the environment where they are developing.

Mariano Rojas and Iván Martínez, coordinators of the book Medición, Investigación, e Incorporación a la Política Pública del Bienestar Subjetivo: América Latina, published by the Scientific and Technological Consultative Forum (FCCyT), are presenting a report elaborated by the Commission for the Study and Promotion of Wellbeing in Latin America about the best practices for subjective wellbeing research, the most common subjects, and a group of suggestions about how to incorporate this topic to public policies.

The Latin American Conference on Measuring Well-Being and Fostering the Progress of Societies was held at the Palacio de Minería in Mexico City from May 11th to 13th, 2011. This event is the first in a series of regional conferences to be conducted within the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies before the 4th World Forum to be held in New Delhi in October 2012.

For centuries, the idea of progress has accompanied human activity and thinking. Great social thinkers have occupied their energies in the deliberation of what determines progress, as well as on the contemplation of what a society in which progress is present might look like. Scientists have occupied themselves with the task of advancing knowledge and technicians with the task of implementing it in order to generate progress. The idea that the progress of societies is the main social objective lies in political discourse and justifies the actions of policy makers and international organizations.