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 published On the Foundations of Happiness in Economics. He is a member of World Wellbeing Panel (a selection of experts who define policies for well-being).
Main contributions of Maurizio Pugno:
– theoretical and empirical socio-psychological explanation of why happiness may not grow with income (set of articles and a book),
– theoretical proof that services can favour economic growth (article cited in international surveys),
– theoretical proof that the informal sector can be permanent and growth-reducing (set of articles with more than 300 citations),
– theoretical proof that BoP constrained growth model is dynamically stable (article selected for a celebration book).
Economic growth is generally regarded by governments and most ordinary people as a panacea for all problems, including issues caused by the COVID pandemic. But this raises an important question: is further growth in advanced economies able to increase well-being once people’s basic subsistence needs are met? Some advanced market economies, e.g. the United States, have exhibited a decline in well-being, both subjectively and objectively measured, over several decades despite seeing economic growth during the same period. This book provides…
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…
The rise and decline of the Italian economy over the past 60 years form a surprisingly regular parabola, if the main European partner economies are taken as benchmark, so that its vertex equal to 1 means that Italy completely caught-up Europe around the 1990s. This implies that, in order to repeat that experience of catching-up, Italy needs to grow at extraordinary rates, which are not on the horizon. The paper shows that the Italians’ morale is even in worse conditions…
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…
Understanding why many people spontaneously perform pro-environmental behaviours, rather than requiring some incentive, is an active area of research. We contribute to this research by relating intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in pursuing central goals in people’s lives, and specifically in looking for a job, to pro-environmental attitudes and engagements. Using an international sample, we find that intrinsic motivation relates positively and extrinsic motivation relates negatively to a variety of subjective pro-environmental outcomes. This result holds for different sub-samples and for various econometric specifications and methodologies. In particular, two-stage…
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