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It is estimated that by 2050, the world population over the age of 65 will reach 1.5 billion. The United Nations predicts that the fastest growth will be in Africa, which suffers from extreme poverty and inequalities. Therefore, older people who play an essential role in African culture face significant well-being challenges. To mitigate these challenges and improve quality of life (QoL), we must first assess their well-being levels. Well-being is a multidimensional concept and needs a multidimensional measure. However, the dimensions that explain older people's QoL differ from other age groups and between developed and developing countries. We construct a unique index applicable to Africa. We functionalised the index using the South African National Income Dynamic Study dataset. By applying the new index empirically, we determine the level of QoL of older adults. Additionally, we establish which dimensions explain the most variance signalling areas for policy intervention. Furthermore, analysing panel data allows us to follow older individuals' well-being over time to determine the trend. Lastly, we analyse different demographic groups' well-being to establish the most vulnerable. We find the dimensions that explain the most variance are household services, economic status, safety, mental and physical health. The well-being of older adults increased over time, likely due to policy interventions, and the most vulnerable group is black African women in traditional and farming areas. Other developing countries could adopt our QoL index to measure the well-being of older people at a micro-level.

In this paper, we explore the response of an aggregate measure of subjective wellbeing to the arrival and passage of the COVID-19 pandemic in a small, geographically separate economy in the South Pacific. Studies of national wellbeing and emotional responses to infection rates during a pandemic have been rare thus far. While several disciplines offer theoretical priors in the case of individuals, far less attention has been paid to the wellbeing and emotional response at a national level. Our paper contributes to the literature by applying a time-series approach to the relationship between wellbeing, emotions and the passage of a pandemic. As such we contribute to a wider literature on macro responses to exogenous shocks. Our analysis involves the use of a wellbeing index and emotional time-series derived from Big Data in the form of tweets originating within New Zealand. The index captures the daily evaluative mood of the country several weeks before the first domestic case of COVID-19 was recorded until several weeks of no new COVID-19 cases. We find distinct reactions to the pandemic: a initial fall in national wellbeing generated by a decrease in the emotions 'joy', 'anticipation' and 'trust'. Following a rapid and severe lockdown designed to limit domestic transmission of the virus national wellbeing recovered relatively quickly. Gaining insight into the wellbeing (happiness) reponse to pandemics at the national level is important because the average level of happiness within countries is known to be associated with a range of economic, social, health and political outcomes.

Previous evidence indicates that trust is an important correlate of compliance with Covid-19 containment policies. However, this conclusion hinges on two crucial assumptions: first, that compliance does not change over time, and second, that mobility and self-reported measures are good proxies for compliance. We demonstrate that compliance changes over the period March 2020 to January 2021, in ten mostly European countries, and that increasing (decreasing) trust in others predicts increasing (decreasing) compliance. We develop the first time-varying measure of compliance, which is calculated as the association between containment policies and people's mobility behaviour using data from Oxford Policy Tracker and Google. We also develop new measures of both trust in others and national institutions by applying sentiment analysis to Twitter data. We test the predictive role of trust using a variety of dynamic panel regression techniques. This evidence indicates compliance should not be taken for granted and confirms the importance of cultivating social trust.