Living Standards

How did living standards in Ghana develop in the long run? The obvious constraint for a long-term perspective is the limited amount of good data and a consistent measure of human well-being. This is especially the case for the period of colonial rule. Using anthropometric techniques we explore the evolution of living standards and regional inequality in Ghana from 1880 to 2000.
Ghana provides an extremely interesting case study. Major economic and social changes took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The development of the agricultural export economy, already under way since the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, was consolidated by the adoption of cocoa, of which Ghana became the world’s leading producer. Cocoa farms, and European-owned mines, eventually attracted extensive migrant labour. Railways and lorries revolutionised transport. Medical knowledge spread. Our findings suggest that, overall, living standards improved during colonial times and that a trend reversal only occurred after the economic crisis in the 1970s. This fact is challenging prominent explanations of colonial legacy and allows insights into the institutional argument for growth.

Andhra Pradesh Government has found a solution to the troubles of land acquisition in building a new capital city (Amaravati) on 34,690 acres of farm land by using land pooling scheme. Amaravati is the India's first planned capital of a state to build up from scratch in the recent decades. The Government strategy was to make all farmers stakeholders in the new capital, so that they voluntarily "pooled" their land with the city development agency known as Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority shortly known as APCRDA. The land parcels owned by individuals or group of owners are legally consolidated by transfer of ownership rights to the authority, which later transfers the ownership of a part of the developed land back to the landowners. Land owners were also given some social and economic benefits for a certain period for participating in Land Pooling scheme along with the return of part of the developed land. As the land owners contribute their land voluntarily, the whole land pooling process was very smooth. The pooling process mostly did not disrupt the current inhabitants. In this context, an attempt is made in this paper to examine the impact of Land Pooling Scheme on Social conditions in the capital city area (Amaravati) of Andhra Pradesh.

The incomes of unskilled workers in Dakar under colonial rule was comparable to those of their counterparts elsewhere in West Africa. Real urban wages grew during the Great Depression and the ‘developmental decade’ following World War II, though accounting properly for housing costs results in substantial downward revision to both the level and growth of real wages. This paper argues that a similar revision is likely necessary for real wage estimates in other colonies in Africa. The magnitude of this correction suggests that much of the fruits of the economic boom of the first half of the twentieth century were ‘soaked up’ by urban landlords, pointing to an important driver of inequality in urban colonial Africa.

This paper offers the first anthropometric estimates on the biological standard of living in central Europe in the first millennium, and expands the literature on the second millenium. The overall picture is one of stagnant heights. There was not much progress in European nutritional status, not even between 1000 and 1800, when recent GDP per capita estimates arrive at growing figures. We find that heights stagnated during the Roman imperial period in Central, Western and Southern Europe. One astonishing result is the height increase in the fifth and sixth centuries. Noteworthy is the synchronicity of the height development in three large regions of Europe. In a regression analysis of height determinants, population density was clearly economically (but not statistically) significant. Decreasing marginal product theories and Malthusian thought cannot be denied for the pre-1800 period. Of marginal significance were climate (warmer temperatures were good for nutritional status), social inequality and gender inequality (both reduce average height).

The life quality research is in fact a major field of the analysis on the social and economic evolution of a country. The living standard (life quality) keeps on being a quite sensitive issue as it implies a number of both methodological and or organizational aspects. The most frequently the life quality is studied on the basis of the surveys being organized at the households level. These surveys (investigations at random) must be achieved in such a way that, by extending the data, they allow us to stick with the fore casted margin of error. This is specifically the reason for this material to briefly bring up the methodology which is applying when organizing a survey. Out of the immensity of data we have selected, after processing them, those conclusions which we considered as being the most significant for suggesting the life quality in Romania. The work includes tables and graphs, being abundantly thrown into relief by absolute and relative data.

Waste is an unavoidable by product of human activities. Economic development, urbanization and improving living standards in cities, have led to an increase in the quantity and complexity of generated waste. Rapid growth of population and industrialization degrades the urban environment and places serious stress on natural resources, which undermines equitable and sustainable development. Inefficient management and disposal of solid waste is an obvious cause of degradation of the environment in most cities of the developing world. Municipal corporations of the developing countries are not able to handle increasing quantities of waste, which results in uncollected waste on roads and in other public places. There is a need to work towards a sustainable waste management system, which requires environmental, institutional, financial, economic and social sustainability.This study explores alternative approaches to municipal solid waste (MSW) management and estimates the cost of waste management in Mumbai, India. Two alternatives considered in the paper are community participation and public private partnership in waste management. Data for the present study are from various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and from the private sector involved in waste management in Mumbai. Mathematical models are used to estimate the cost per ton of waste management for both of the alternatives, which are compared with the cost of waste management by Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM). It is found that the cost per ton of waste management is Rs. 1518 (US$35) with community participation; Rs. 1797 (US$41) with public private partnership (PPP); and Rs. 1908 (US$44) when only MCGM handles the waste. Hence, community participation in waste management is the least cost option and there is a strong case for comprehensively involving community participation in waste management.

The main aim of this paper is to build up and to analyze a composite indicator, the Happy Planet Index (HPI), as an alternative measure to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in evaluating nations’ well-being. HPI was firstly developed by the New Economic Foundation in July 2006 and it is the first well-being composite indicator that considers in its calculation a subjective measure of well-being - life satisfaction. This work updates the HPI for 178 countries using the most recent available datasets. Due to the lack of country data for some of the variables used to build up the HPI, it has been necessary to run some missing data estimation procedures. The results obtained show that no country manage to score high in terms of HPI because of countries’ incapacity to maintain high living standards (expressed in terms of happy life years) and at the same time assure sustainability. Comparing HPI with GDP, no association between the resulting countries’ classification was found, living pro...

Municipal solid waste (MSW) is the abridgment of the waste generated from domestic, commercial, and construction activities by natural persons that is collected and treated by municipalities. Exponential growth of population and urbanization, and the development of social economy, coupled with the improvement of living standard, have resulted in an increase in the amount of MSW generation throughout the world. On average the developed countries typically generate 521.95–759.2 kg per person per year (kpc) and 109.5–525.6 kpc typically by developing countries. Recent estimates suggest that the MSW generation globally exceeds 2 billion tons per year, which is a potential threat to environmental dilapidation. Therefore, MSW management (MSWM) seems to be one of the key topics for environmental protection in present days and also in the future. The authors have illustrated MSW generation and composition analysis and have provided a comprehensive review of MSWM in different countries throughout the world based on the available literatures. Some of the important aspects of waste management, such as composting, landfilling, and incineration, are illustrated.

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