From Economic Productivity to Productive Well-Being: The Role of Life Satisfaction and Adjusted Net Savings

Productivity – a driver of economic growth – is not necessarily compatible with societal well-being, nor environmental sustainability. Various authors contributed frameworks to incorporate environmental issues in the measurement of productivity, or studied the role of subjective well-being for productivity. However, studies proposing ways to account for both subjective well-being and sustainability in productivity measurement are scarce. We examine whether and to what extent it is possible to include subjective well-being and sustainability measures among the inputs and/or outputs of a traditional productivity framework. Specifically, we adopt a data-driven approach to test whether subjective wellbeing and adjusted net savings meaningfully contribute to computing a productivity-like indicator. We apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to European data from 2005 to 2018. We find that including subjective well-being among the inputs and the outputs of production meaningfully contributes to the measurement of total factor productivity.