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The paper attempts to empirically assess whether GDP per capita or the human capital index is a better measure of happiness.

Cross‐country regressions are run to see how GDP per capita fairs in comparison to the human capital index in explaining happiness based on survey questionnaires.

The paper finds that GDP per capita accounts for a far greater share of the cross country variation in happiness based on survey data than the human capita index and assorted other measures of human welfare.

The important implication is that the often heard criticism that GDP per capita is inappropriate for use in economic analysis, especially in the area of economic development and other international fields, because it is not specifically designed as a measure of welfare, may be unfounded.

The paper shows that GDP per capita is a better measure of happiness defined in surveys than the human capital index.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the size of government and public debt on real economic growth, for a panel of 175 countries around the world.

The paper utilizes the fixed‐effects and random‐effects techniques to estimate the panel regressions.

The results indicate that both the size of government and the extent of government indebtedness have negative effects on economic growth.

The findings suggest that the authorities ought to take the necessary steps to curtail excessive government spending and public debts, in order to promote economic growth.

The contribution of the paper is its application of the fixed‐ and random‐effects techniques in modeling the relation of real economic growth to the size of government and public debt, for a panel of 175 countries around the world.

The degree of integration among different economies is an important issue in international economics and finance. This article employs daily stock market data for the period 1988 through 1999 to investigate the return dynamics and the extent of the stock market linkages across six newly industrialized countries (NIC’s) of Asia, and documents the role of Japan and the US in this region. Primarily, the study finds that there are significant stock market linkages among the emerging equity markets of Hong Kong, India, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. While dominant relationships do exist, no country is totally insulated from market movements that emanate from other countries in the region. Furthermore, the study documents the presence of temporal instability in the transmission mechanism that coincides with the Asian economic crisis. During the period in which the NIC’s experienced rapidly rising stock valuations, Singapore and the US had dominant causal influences on these Asian markets. However, in the period of financial crisis during the latter part of the 1990s decade, Singapore’s influence is greatly diminished while shocks from other countries, most notably India, play a more dominant role. Several important policy implications are derived from the results.