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

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I EIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. We use data from two rounds of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) to study the determinants of subjective well-being in China over the period 2005-2010 during which selfreported happiness scores show an increase across all income groups. Ordered probit regression analysis of well-being reveals large influence of gender, rural residency and household income. After controlling for demographic attributes, health, unemployment status, household size, agricultural hukou (household registration identity) and education status, household assets, the influence of past and future income and province dummies, we find that women, urban residents and people with higher income are happier in China. More schooling, better health and being employed are positively and significantly correlated with well-being. Sub-sample s reveals that the rich only care about relative income whereas the effect of absolute income dominates in case of the poorer section. The influence of absolute income is larger among women compared to men and in turn explains why women, despite being poorer, are happier in China, conditional on socio-economic differences. On the other hand, rural residents are poorer than urban residents so that conditional on having the same income, there is no rural-urban happiness gap. Our results suggest that while further decline in poverty will enhance well-being in China, policies that reduce rural-urban and gender inequalities are also likely to boost well-being. JEL C...

Gender Difference in General Self-Efficacy among Young-Old Elderly Aged 60–74 in Rural Shandong China: A Cross-Sectional Survey

“…Females have lower socioeconomic status than males [50,51], which was consistent with studies of Wang, Y. and Asadullah, M.N. [52,53]. As a result, the female is more sensitive when the income changes, so the impact of incomes on female GSE is more pronounced.…”

Linking Prohibited Grazing Policy to Farmers’ Subjective Well-Being: A Case Study in Yanchi County, China

“…Subjective well-being was strongly affected by relative income, which is consistent with the existing results [67][68][69]. Asadullah et al [70] stated that the rich only care about relative income, whereas poorer farmers' SWB in rural China is mainly affected by absolute income. However, in this study, the correlation between absolute household income and farmers' life satisfaction (happiness) was not statistically significant; there is the issue of income endogeneity which was not considered in this study [71].…”

Effects of Medical Security Satisfaction and Trust in Doctors on Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from China

“…Therefore, referring to the research of Asadullah et al (2018); Wu and Li (2017) the control variables in this study mainly include the following categories: 1) the social and demographic characteristics factors, including gender, age, age square, nationality, religious belief, political status, household registration type, education level and marital status. 2) income factors, including absolute income and relative income.…”

“…Many previous empirical researches often measured subjective well-being by coding respondents' responses to a single question (e.g., in general, how satisfied or unsatisfied are you with your life overall? ), including Hojman and Miranda (2018); Asadullah et al (2018); Zeng and Yu (2019) and etc. Some large-scale social surveys also take the subjective well-being and related factors into consideration such as European Social Surveys, China General Social Survey (CGSS) and China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS).…”

“…First of all, there are still a large number of studies continuing to investigate the impact of economic factors on subjective well-being. Relevant studies suggest that although the increase of absolute income can improve subjective well-being by satisfying people's most basic material needs and personal preferences, relative income is crucial to subjective well-being in the long run (Ferrer-I-Carbonell, 2005;Wang and Vanderweele, 2011;Asadullah et al, 2018) i.e., people will compare their income with others, their previous income and their expected income, and the comparison results can influence the subjective well-being.…”