Enhancing Poverty-Abatement Programs: a Subjective Well-Being Contribution

This paper questions the assumption used in designing social policies that raising people’s income automatically translates into greater well-being. Based on a subjective well-being approach and a representative survey from Costa Rica the paper shows that there is substantial dissonance in the classification of persons as poor and as being in well-being deprivation. The existence of dissonances leads to the conceptualization of different trajectories out-of-poverty and into well-being. Public policies oriented towards the abatement of income poverty can have a greater impact on people’s well-being if they recognize the complexity of human beings and acknowledge that their programs affect satisfaction in all domains of life. The paper states that public policy should not only be concerned with getting people out of income poverty, but also with placing them in a life-satisfying situation. The paper also discusses strategies that could improve poverty-abatement programs.