Talita Greyling is a Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. She specialises in well-being economics and quality of life studies and has a keen interest in fourth industrial revolution applications. She developed and established the "Gross National Happiness Index.today (GNH.today) project". The project uses 4IR methods and Big Data to construct real-time happiness and emotion data. Consequently, the GNH.today project partnered with the Auckland University of Technology. The project received the Vice Chancellor's Distinguished Award for Innovation and was accepted as official statistical data by Stats New Zealand.
Talita is the author of numerous articles in both multi-disciplinary and economic journals. Since 2020 she has been actively involved in COVID-19 research projects. In 2023 the paper A tale of three countries: How did Covid-19 lockdown impact happiness? South African Journal of Economics, 89(1): 25-43, was named as the Top cited paper by Wiley. Recently she co-authored a chapter "Big Data and Happiness" in the Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics.
She is the Vice-President (Membership) of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) and a member of the World Well-being Panel. She is a Research Fellow of the Global Labor Organization (GLO). She is the associate editor for Pioneers in Quality of Life Theory and Research for the Journal of Applied Research in Quality of Life and a co-editor for Economics in the Journal of Happiness Studies.
Talita is involved in several international collaborations related to well-being research and is a partner in the Well-being in a Sustainable Economy Revisited (WISER) project for Horizon Europe 2022 (HORIZON-CL2-2022-TRANSFORMATIONS-01: Public policies and indicators for well-being and sustainable development project).
Talita received her PhD from the University of Johannesburg, and her main research interests are the measurement of well-being, the construction of indices and the development of real-time well-being data using 4IR methods. She teaches Development Economics and Well-being Economics.
She regularly participates in radio and television shows and has various podcasts and TEDx talks about measuring well-being using 4IR methods.
