Z18 - Cultural Economics: Public PolicyReturn

This paper examines the profound effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on South Korean society, particularly focusing on the economic repercussions of a shock in energy use efficiency from Q1 2020 to Q3 2023. Employing advanced Bayesian estimation and impulse response function methods, the study reveals that enhanced energy use efficiency significantly boosts key economic metrics, including output, consumption, employment, energy use, real wages and investment. Additionally, an increase in real money holdings and a decrease in both deposit and loan interest rates are observed. The analysis further explores the impact of monetary policy adjustments made by South Korea to mitigate the economic challenges posed by the pandemic. Our results indicate that these policy shifts temporarily elevate the aforementioned economic variables and raise deposit and loan interest rates, despite a concurrent reduction in real wages. The findings provide critical insights for policy formulation and economic recovery strategies in the context of global health crises.

The article deals with life and job satisfaction of the Czech working-age population. First it highlights concepts of happiness and satisfaction within the emerging multidimensional approaches to individual and societal well-being. Then, it resumes the data sources of those measures, with specific attention to the Module on Subjective Well-being of the survey EU-SILC. Using this data, basic characteristics and determinants of life satisfaction are shown first and basic characteristics and determinants of job satisfaction after that. Finally the relationship between these two dimensions of satisfaction is analysed. It appears that determination of life satisfaction by socio-demographic and economic characteristics of individuals and households is much higher than the determination of job satisfaction. The identity of "contradictory" categories where life satisfaction significantly outweighs job satisfaction and vice versa is weak.

The article documents the development of life satisfaction in four transitional Central European countries since 1991, in comparison with Germany and Austria. After presentation of data sources and the overview of the literature regarding the effect of transition on life satisfaction, surveys of European Values Study 1991, 1999 and 2008 are analysed together with macroeconomic data. First, satisfaction levels are correlated with GDP and then, individual characteristics of income, gender, education and family status are regressed to as explanatory variables of life satisfaction. While the explanatory power of GDP is found as very weak for the entire period, the effect of objective characteristics has peaked in 1999 and the effect of subjective perceptions in 2008. The survey information on trends after 2008 differs but no dramatic change of the life satisfaction due to the economic recession has so far appeared.

There is a growing effort to find alternative measures of the overall performance of economy and social development. More complex indicators are constructed, multi-dimensional approaches are searched and concepts of subjective well-being are increasingly applied. While academic research is booming and politicians are interested about innovative approach in the West, not much attention is given to the topic in the Czech Republic. The article drafts some of many problems appearing on the interface of the objective and subjective indicators. In the first section, some multi-dimensional approaches are tackled and in the second, concepts of happiness and satisfaction are overviewed. The relationship between economic growth and human happiness is described next. In the fourth section, survey data on reported happiness in the Czech Republic, ready for analysis and comparison, are described. In the conclusion, perspectives of research in the area are outlined, together with a possible use of subjective indictors in policies.