A Philosophical and Empirical Investigation into Buddhist Economics

There is a growing body of literature on Buddhist economics from a philosophical perspective; however, no work to date has sought to empirically validate it as an effective economic theory at a global scale. In my paper, I draw on the long history of Buddhist metaphysics to construct an account of Buddhist ethics and then proceed to derive a set of Buddhist economic principles. I draw on the World Happiness Report’s methodology to quantitatively demonstrate the relationship between Buddhist economic principles and the psychological wellbeing of a country’s citizens, as measured through their own evaluation of their quality of life and the dispersion of those evaluations within a given country. Overall, I find that the implementation of Buddhist economic principles at a national government level is positively correlated with higher average levels of wellbeing and lower dispersion of life evaluations. However, I also find significant differences between how Buddhist principles affect wellbeing between countries with initial higher and lower rates of wellbeing dispersion