NEED SATISFACTION AND WELFARE OUTCOMES - THEORY AND EXPLANATIONS

This paper has two goals. First, it outlines an operational concept of ''human need'' which can be used as a criterion to evaluate and explain the welfare outcomes of different socio-economic systems and policies. Second, it considers a range of theories put forward to explain global variations in levels of need satisfaction and begins to test these against the cross-national evidence. The importance of the concept of need is commonly accepted for the moral justification of welfare provision. Yet there is a wide disagreement about what human needs actually are and how they should be measured both within and across cultures. Debates also rage about the links, if any, between the existence of recognized needs and the right to their satisfaction. The concept of need is found in two distinct sets of literature - philosophy and social science. However, these two discourses rarely come into contact. In our recent book, Len Doyal and I aim to remedy this by developing a concept of need which is grounded in both (Doyal and Gough, 1991). In chapters 12 and 13 of this book we go on to chart global differences in levels of need satisfaction at the present time and begin to explain the variations we observe. The second half of this paper starts to take forward this analysis and presents some preliminary findings of a more recent research project (Gough and Thomas, 1993).