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The paper offers a critique of happiness research based on subjective well-being (SWB) data and proposes an alternative approach to the study of well-being drawing on the political economy tradition. The World Happiness Report (WHR) interpretation of the impact of the global financial crisis on SWB data is used to illustrate the problems with happiness research and the merits of an alternative political economy approach to well-being. The development of such an approach takes inspiration from broader notions of social provisioning rooted in political economy, and its application is seen to yield a better understanding of the meaning of, and the changes in, SWB data than that found in the WHR.

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This paper contextualises this special issue of the IJMCP on global labour by surveying the state of formation of the global labour force. Drawing on ILO data it distinguishes several groups within the global labour force. It notes problems in measuring the size of these groups and the debates about their nature and draws attention to the contributions of the papers that follow. It then considers how the global crisis that began in 2008 is affecting the global labour force and the light thrown on this by the papers in this issue.