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).
For half a decade the World Wellbeing Panel (WWP) has promoted wellbeing as the ultimate purpose of all major decision makers, particularly government. For the most recent survey, members of the World Wellbeing Panel were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with two statements related to: the importance and the meaning of social relationship for well-being, the possibility to choose to be happy. These are their answers.
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…
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…
People gain enjoyment from exercising their agency and interacting with others in order to accomplish projects and change reality, as is evident from the successful evolution of homo sapiens. Hence, time can be enjoyable in both pursuing and achieving socially valued goals. Since modern economic progress offers products in growing abundance, thus increasingly exploiting individuals’ time and interaction, people are tempted to seek enjoyment in another way, i.e. in consumption itself, as homo economicus would suggest. On the basis of…
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…
