China’s life satisfaction, 1990–2010

Abstract

Despite its unprecedented growth in output per capita in the last two decades, China has essentially followed the life satisfaction trajectory of the central and eastern European transition countries—a U-shaped swing and a nil or declining trend. There is no evidence of an increase in life satisfaction of the magnitude that might have been expected to result from the fourfold improvement in the level of per capita consumption that has occurred. As in the European countries, in China the trend and U-shaped pattern appear to be related to a pronounced rise in unemployment followed by a mild decline, and an accompanying dissolution of the social safety net along with growing income inequality. The burden of worsening life satisfaction in China has fallen chiefly on the lowest socioeconomic groups. An initially highly egalitarian distribution of life satisfaction has been replaced by an increasingly unequal one, with decreasing life satisfaction in persons in the bottom third of the income distribution and increasing life satisfaction in those in the top third.

Subjective well-being in China, 2005–2010: The role of relative income, gender, and location

“…Brockmann et al, 2009), we find that well-being in China appears to have risen in recent years, for all income and social groups, indicating a period of modest recovery in happiness, as also argued by Easterlin et al, (2012) and Easterlin (2012). Our estimates of the micro-determinants of well-being show that relative income matters for individual well-being: individuals who report their economic position to be lower than others in the community and/or worse than that 10 years ago also report being less happy with life.…”

“…Moreover, it is possible that the happiness-income relationship has changed in recent years in a way not captured by older surveys and studies. 12 Indeed, a recent study by Easterlin et al (2012) concludes that the long-term movement of life satisfaction scores in China during 1990-2010 has followed a U-shaped pattern, showing a sign of recovery in recent years. 13 China's fast-growing and increasingly unequal economy provides an ideal context to revisit the importance of absolute income as the fundamental determinant of happiness.…”

Revisiting the evidence for cardinal treatment of ordinal variables

“…For example, when revisiting the Easterlin paradox (1974), Easterlin et al (2010) employ OLS regressions to study the dependence of happiness on GDP, showing "that the long term nil relationship between [average] happiness and income holds also for a number of developing countries, the eastern European countries transitioning from socialism to capitalism, and an even wider sample of developed countries than previously studied" [p. 22463] and that "that in the short-term in all three groups of countries, happiness and income go together" [p. 22463]. In a later paper Easterlin et al (2012) Dynan and Ravina (2007), for example, use OLS regressions to study how peoples' happiness depends on their relative income position within their geographic area. Hetschko et al (2014) apply linear regression models to study the impact of the transition from unemployment to retirement on life satisfaction (after conditioning on different sets of explanatory variables).…”

Wellbeing in China

“…Easterlin et al 2012). Studies have examined various aspects of the wellbeing of the urban populace (Appleton and Song 2008;Cheng et al 2014c;Frey and Song 1997;Gao et al 2014;Smyth et al 2010;Wu and Tam 2015); rural populace Knight et al 2009;Liang et al 2014b) and rural-urban migrants (Gao and Smyth 2011;Knight and Gunatilaka 2010;Nielsen et al 2010).…”