What do you mean: Well-Being or Human Development? : An analysis of the relationship between the concepts of well-being and human development, seen from the dimensions of Health, Education, and Material standard of living

Abstract: Well-being and human development are two concepts within the development debate that are often used as different but defined and operationalised in very similar ways. This has led to a diffuse differentiation between them, where it is unclear what we include in either concept, which can cause validity problems in e.g. research, as it is not clear what we are really studying. This is the motivation for my thesis, to examine how similar these concepts are in practice to determine if they can be conceptualised as they have been previously, or if more effort must be made to differentiate between them. I do this by examining three dimensions which are central to both concepts (Health, Education, and Material standard of living) to see how the concepts correlate within each dimension. These correlations I then control for both GDP per capita and level of democracy. My results show that there is no significant correlation between well-being and human development when controlling for GDP per capita and level of democracy, showing that the concepts are in fact not as similar as they are treated in the literature thus far. In conclusion, this means that the concepts cannot be conceptualised as similarly as they have been before, but instead, more effort must be made to sufficiently differentiate between them.