Wellbeing over 50

Drawing on the Senian capability approach to welfare economics and using panel data from the English Longitudinal Survey of Ageing (ELSA), this paper illustrates how the approach can be used to shed light on wellbeing in older age. Specifically, we estimate models of variables related to three aspects of a person’s wellbeing: daily activities, happiness and capabilities. Results indicate that the production of activities depends significantly inter alia on education, health and gender; that happiness is related to a wide variety of activities and that there are potentially significant gender inequalities in some of the constraints that older people face and which impinge upon their wellbeing. The paper concludes by suggesting that the capabilities approach is a workable tool for exploring the production and distribution of wellbeing in older age.