Maurizio Pugno is Full Professor of Economics at the University of Cassino, Italy. He studied at Cambridge, UK (M.Phil.) and Birkbeck, London. He taught at the University of Trento, Italy, and at the International PhD School of S. Anna, Pisa, Italy. He is a member of World Wellbeing Panel.
His research interests are in: Economics of Happiness Economics of Human Capital and Capability Economics and Psychology Social Economics Economics of Growth, Structural Change, and Cycle History of Economic Ideas.
For half a decade the World Wellbeing Panel (WWP) has promoted wellbeing as the ultimate purpose of all major decision makers, particularly government. In mid April 2020, while locked in our homes in fear of contracting COVID-19, the World Wellbeing Panel experts were asked: “How to maintain well-being during isolation while facing huge emotional stress from the threat of the COVID-19 virus”. Their responses give us a global view of how to cope in these difficult times because they come…
Presentation at the workshop “Happiness, well-being, and (de)growth”. Fondazione Luigi Einaudi. Torino, 21 giugno 2019. Uploaded here (the first 31 minutes). The presentation will be published in Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, n.2, 2019.
The controversies on the relationship (or `gradient’) between GDP and subjective well-being oppose those who claim that the gradient is positive and stable around the world to those who argue that long-run trends of subjective well-being are flat despite economic growth. The possible existence of structural breaks of the gradient within the same country is a challenge to both views. By focusing on the case of Italy, we show that the long-run trends of GDP and of well-being turned from…
Economic growth has extraordinarily increased the availability of market goods to satisfy people’s need for comfort, but at the same time it has also raised great challenges to their working, family, and personal lives. Will people learn the skill necessary to cope with these challenges and take full enjoyment from economic growth? The book of Maurizio Pugno explores this question starting from the insights of Tibor Scitovsky (Budapest 1910 – Stanford 2002), and approaching a theory of ‘human welfare’. Along this…
Sen’s ‘capability approach’ is especially focused on human development as freedom from deprivations, while Scitovsky’s The Joyless Economy is focused on how people can expand their internal capability endogenously by enjoying learning as a socially embedded process. This paper uses the complementarity between the two authors to build a comprehensive dynamic approach to people’s ‘functionings and capabilities’. Different groups of ‘functionings’ are thus characterised by their different patterns of development in interaction with the resources available and the social context.…
