Altruism around the world. What can we learn from international surveys?

Abstract

This paper strives to provide an overview of altruism around the world whilst tackling these two issues from an economic perspective. Since we address altruism at an international level, our focus is on international surveys as a way of approaching altruism, and experimental methods have been disregarded. More precisely, we have selected the most commonly used international surveys in the economic literature: Global Preference Survey (GPS), World Values Survey (WVS), International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), European Social Survey (ESS), and General Social Survey (GSS). These surveys have been widely employed to analyse the characteristics of altruistic individuals and the implications of altruism on areas as diverse as the contribution to public goods, the prevention of COVID, the reduction of corruption, the redistribution of income, and public.