Valuation of Trust in Government: The Wellbeing Valuation Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a good article, well written, well-structured, and well presented. The authors give a detailed presentation of the main strengths and weaknesses of their analysis for monetary estimation of trust in government.

Just a couple of comments: 1) with respect to the analyses; 2) with respect to the presentation.

1) Appendix Table 6 shows a correlation of 0.7 (medium-high) between social support and GDP which would deserve some more reflection than the authors offer in the text.

2) With respect to formal aspects, just a brief recommendation in relation to Table 1 of the descriptive statistics. At least for this table, I think it would be better to draw vertical lines to separate the first 3 columns (those referring to the denomination and definition of the variables) because the texts in column 2 and column 3 overlap, which makes it difficult to read correctly the definition of the variables in column 3.

Author Response

We are most grateful to the reviewers for excellent and very helpful referee's reports, and the opportunity to submit a revised version of our paper, entitled “The Welfare Cost of Diminished Trust in Government”.

As suggested by one of review, the title has been modified from The Welfare Cost of Diminished Trust in Government to “Valuation of Trust in Government: The Wellbeing Valuation Approach”

The revised version of the paper is attached, with substantial track revisions. Point-by-point responses to the very helpful comments and suggestions of the two reviewers are in a pdf file.

We hope that the revised version has accommodated the requirements of the two reviewers.  

Thank you for your kind consideration.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Interesting article, applause for the Authors for taking up the topic. Interesting selection of research methodology. Efficiently written text. However, I have a few comments and doubts, about which below.

1. The title does not match the content of the text. The title social costs do not appear once in the text. I don't understand this definition of the title. I suggest changing the title to one that suits the content more closely.
The text does not sufficiently emphasize the social costs of declining trust in government.

2. Despite the adoption of PPPs for income calculation, the calculations do not sufficiently capture the differences in purchasing power, and above all in the fulfillment of consumption needs, which are quite different in so many countries surveyed. In some of them, for example, access to water (or medical care, etc.) and its cost may affect the level of wellbeing, in others meeting these needs is obvious and does not affect wellbeing.

3. Correctly applied and, above all, interesting in terms of construction, the indicator is too economical, in my opinion, an approach.

4. I also cannot count 97 countries (and not counties, as in line 12; 66). In tab. 2 (line 196) indicated, if I was right, 52 countries, which together with the information from the bottom of the table (line 197) for 42 more gives a total of 94, not 97.

5. It seems advisable to develop the discussion. The Discussion and Conclusion part is, in my opinion, very mixed up. Some conclusions result from the existing literature and are not strongly reflected in the research in this work. Discussion is mixed up with Conclusion and additionally with limitations. For better readability of the text and for its scientific value, I propose to extend these parts (Discussion) and separate them.

6. Some conclusions are obvious and have been known for years from many existing studies. For example, "First, in line with previous studies [4,5,12], a higher level of people reporting having confidence in their national government relates to a higher national average life satisfaction level" (line 381-383). I would also like a different wording or additional wording of the application (3) "trust affects cross-national life satisfaction directly through life satisfaction" (line 387-388).

7. The problem of wellbeing is known from literary art and is well researched. An additional problem is his very subjective perception. In this case, it is assessed through the prism of a selected factor - trust along with several measures. I guess there was a geographically comprehensive approach. Conclusions should not be generalized.

 

Author Response

We are most grateful to the reviewers for excellent and very helpful referee's reports, and the opportunity to submit a revised version of our paper, entitled “The Welfare Cost of Diminished Trust in Government”.

As suggested by one of reviews, the title has been modified from The Welfare Cost of Diminished Trust in Government to “Valuation of Trust in Government: The Wellbeing Valuation Approach”

The revised version of the paper is attached, with substantial track revisions. Point-by-point responses to the very helpful comments and suggestions of the two reviewers are in a pdf file.

We hope that the revised version has accommodated the requirements of the two reviewers.  

Thank you for your kind consideration.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf