Avowed Happiness in Confucian Asia: Ascertaining its Distribution,Patterns, and Sources

This study reviewed three philosophical accounts of happiness, and then tested those accounts with the Asiabarometer surveys conducted in six Confucian societies during the summer of 2006. Statistical analyses of these surveys reveal that East Asians tend to experience happiness to a greater extent when they experience enjoyment together with achievement and/or satisfaction. The preponderance of such multi-dimensional conceptions in all those societies poses a direct challenge to a single dimensional account of happiness in the West. The analyses also reveal that positive assessments of interpersonal relationships matter more than the amount of knowledge or wealth in living a happy life in Confucian societies.

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Money Does not Buy Happiness: Or Does It? A Reassessment Based on the Combined Effects of Wealth,Income and Consumption

The paper uses household economic panel data from five countries—Australia, Britain, Germany, Hungary and The Netherlands—to provide a reassessment of the impact of economic well-being on happiness. The main conclusion is that happiness is considerably more affected by economic circumstances than previously believed. In all five countries wealth affects life satisfaction more than income. In the countries for which consumption data are available (Britain and Hungary), non-durable consumption expenditures also prove at least as important to happiness as income.

The Quality of Life in Hong Kong

The AsiaBarometer of 1,000 respondents shows that Hong Kong people have a great desire for materialistic attainment, and such an emphasis on materialism bodes ill for their quality of life. Negative assessments of the public life sphere, which encompasses the natural environment, the social welfare system, and the democratic system, also detract from the experiences of happiness, enjoyment, and accomplishment in Hong Kong. Surprisingly, access to digital communication devices helps Hong Kong people to experience a greater quality of life.

A dynamic general equilibrium analysis of the political economy of public education

The primary objective of this paper is to highlight the distinct roles of altruism and of self-interest in the political determination of a public education policy. I assess the relative importance of three factors in the determination of the equilibrium level of this policy: altruism, the impact of public funding of education on social security benefits, and its impact on factor prices. I then focus on the impact of implementing a social security system on the equilibrium levels of education funding and on welfare. I find that although in the benchmark economy, the presence of social security might generate support for public funding of education, its overall effect on the well-being of individuals is negative for any level of social security taxation.

Happy by What Standard? The Role of Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Comparisons in Ratings of Happiness

The present research suggests that many of the most commonly-used indicators of happiness are constructed in a manner that renders them susceptible to null or misleading findings. While few happiness indicators specify particular comparison standards, we demonstrate that people tend to evaluate their happiness relative to comparison standards and give reliably different happiness ratings based on the comparison standards they spontaneously adopt. In Study 1, participants reported that intrapersonal comparisons were a more important consideration than interpersonal comparisons in determining their happiness ratings. In Study 2, participants using a free-response format more frequently reported making intrapersonal comparisons than interpersonal comparisons when rating happiness. In both Studies 1 and 2, participants who reported using interpersonal comparisons gave higher happiness ratings than those who reported using intrapersonal comparisons. In Study 3, participants who were prompted to make interpersonal comparisons gave higher happiness ratings than those prompted to make intrapersonal comparisons. We discuss the implications of these findings for measuring subjective well-being and interpreting happiness research.

Life Satisfaction and Happiness in Turkey

This research aims to investigate life satisfaction and happiness in Turkey. It extends the previous researches on subjective well-being (SWB) for Turkey by considering both happiness and life satisfaction. The previous researches for Turkey are local studies, and their findings cannot be generalized to the population of Turkish society. Given these facts, the factors that shape individual happiness and life satisfaction amongst Turkish people are determined using a representative survey of sociocultural and political change, World Values Survey (WVS). Some results obtained in this study are similar to typical findings such as a negative age effect, positive influences of income and health status, and a negative effect of unemployment. Contrary to the expectations, middle education has a negative direct effect on life satisfaction among females, and the upper education level is insignificant in the life satisfaction model. By comparing the correlates of happiness and life satisfaction across different years, this research aims to provide insights for policy makers and professionals to improve the perceived lives of Turkish people.

Measuring Well-being Across Europe: Description of the ESS Well-being Module and Preliminary Findings

It has become customary to judge the success of a society through the use of objective indicators, predominantly economic and social ones. Yet in most developed nations, increases in income, education and health have arguably not produced comparable increases in happiness or life satisfaction. While much has been learned from the introduction of subjective measures of global happiness or life satisfaction into surveys, significant recent progress in the development of high-quality subjective measures of personal and social well-being has not been fully exploited. This article describes the development of a set of well-being indicators which were included in Round 3 of the European Social Survey. This Well-being Module seeks to evaluate the success of European countries in promoting the personal and social well-being of their citizens. In addition to providing a better understanding of domain-specific measures, such as those relating to family, work and income, the design of the Well-being Module recognises that advancement in the field requires us to look beyond measures which focus on how people feel (happiness, pleasure, satisfaction) to measures which are more concerned with how well they function. This also shifts the emphasis from relatively transient states of well-being to measures of more sustainable well-being. The ESS Well-being Module represents one of the first systematic attempts to create a set of policy-relevant national well-being accounts.

Absolute Income,Relative Income,and Happiness

This paper uses data from the World Values Survey to investigate how an individual’s self-reported happiness is related to (i) the level of her income in absolute terms, and (ii) the level of her income relative to other people in her country. The main findings are that (i) both absolute and relative income are positively and significantly correlated with happiness, (ii) quantitatively, changes in relative income have much larger effects on happiness than do changes in absolute income, and (iii) the effects on happiness of both absolute and relative income are small when compared to the effects several non-pecuniary factors.

An Index of the Condition of Children: The Ideal and a Less-than-Ideal U.S. Example

This paper uses recent data on U.S. children from the National Survey of America’s Families (NSAF) to create indices that tally the number of problems or risks that individual children experience. We compare results with those from indices developed elsewhere that assess the change across sets of population-level indicators. While the two types of indices show similar trends over time, specific changes, as well as trends, depend on the specific domain of well-being or context examined, highlighting the importance of the distinction between well-being and context. Children with problems in multiple domains tend to be socio-economically and demographically disadvantaged compared with other children. We preface this work by providing an overview of the history of child well-being indicators and distinguish indices of child well-being from indices of the condition of children.

The dynamics of immigrant welfare and labor market behavior

This paper analyzes transitions into and out of social assistance, unemployment, and employment. We estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model, controlling for endogenous initial condition and unobserved heterogeneity, using a large representative Swedish panel data set. The empirical results suggest that particularly refugee immigrants display a greater degree of “structural” state dependence than natives. The high welfare participation rates among refugee immigrants may be due to the existence of a “welfare trap”, while participation among natives and non-refugee immigrants is largely due to permanent unobserved characteristics. These results suggest that welfare reforms may have differential effects on refugee immigrants and natives.

Are They Frigid to the Economic Development? Reconsideration of the Economic Effect on Subjective Well-being in Japan

The question about the contribution of economic growth to subjective well-being has caused long-standing debate in the literature on subjective well-being, and Japan is often mentioned as a typical case of no contribution. With a careful examination of the survey text, nevertheless, this study provides a completely opposite result. In other words, the average score of subjective well-being is significantly associated with the level of national income per capita. The study also finds that not only the level of national income per capita but also its growth rate is a significant explanatory variable. However, it is also suggested that a structural subsidence of subjective well-being occurred in the late 1990s, when many Japanese people lost confidence in their traditional economic system.

The Quality of Life in Japan

This study is part of a collaborative project examining the quality of life in Confucian societies in Asia. Our major findings suggest that, when our sixteen specific life domains are grouped into three life spheres, namely, material, post-material, and public, the Japanese people tend to be most satisfied with the post-material sphere of life and least satisfied with the public sphere of life such as the condition of environment and welfare system. In searching the direct, independent effects of demographics, lifestyles, value priorities, and domain assessments on the quality of life, none of the public life domain assessments shows a significant impact on the quality of life, while friendships and spiritual life in the post-material sphere of life are an important determinant. Equally notable is the finding that neither educational attainment nor household income contributes significantly to the experience of subjective well-being. Leading a global lifestyle also affects positively the quality of life. Finally, being married and satisfaction with marital life appear to be powerful and prevalent influence on the quality of life in Japan.

Fertility, child care outside the home, and pay-as-you-go social security

We examine the long-run effects of the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security scheme on fertility and welfare of individuals in an overlapping generations model, assuming that child-care services are available in the market. We show that the impact of a tax increase on fertility depends on the relative magnitudes of the standard intergenerational redistribution effect through the social security system, the (implicit) subsidy effect through tax-exemption of child rearing at home, and the price effect through changes in the relative price of market child care, and that if parental child-rearing time is inelastic, a tax cut could bring about a Pareto-improving allocation.

Capping Kids: The Family Cap and Nonmarital Childbearing

An explicit goal of policymakers in drafting welfare reform policies was to reduce incentives for nonmarital childbearing. This paper estimates the extent to which state welfare reforms have lowered age and race-specific nonmarital fertility. Using state-level data from 1984 to 1999—a time period that includes the passage and implementation of national welfare reform—we estimate fixed effects models corrected for heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation. We find evidence that the family cap, a policy that decreases or eliminates the incremental increase in benefits for mothers who have an additional child while on welfare, is associated with a decline in nonmarital birth ratios. However, we also find that the family cap is associated with higher marital birth rates. Taken together with other research, our findings suggest evidence of policy endogeneity.

The Quality of Life in South Korea

The AsiaBarometer survey of 1,023 respondents shows Life in Korea is highly modernized and digitalized without being much globalized. Despite the modernization and digitalization of their lifestyles, ordinary citizens still prioritize materialistic values more than post-materialistic values, and they remain least satisfied in the material life sphere. A multivariate analysis of the Korean survey reveals that their positive assessments of their standard of living and marriage are the most powerful influences on the quality of life they experience. Remarkable improvements in the objective conditions of life for the past three decades have failed to transform Korea into a nation of well-being.

The determinants and consequences of child care subsidies for single mothers in the USA

This paper provides an analysis of child care subsidies under welfare reform in the USA. We used data from the 1999 National Survey of America's Families to analyze the determinants of receipt of a child care subsidy and the effects of subsidy receipt on employment, school attendance, unemployment, and welfare participation. Ordinary least-squares estimates that treat subsidy receipt as exogenous show an effect of subsidy receipt on employment of about 13 percentage points. Two-stage least-squares estimates that treat subsidy receipt as endogenous and use county dummies as identifying instruments show an effect of 33 percentage points on employment, 20 percentage points on unemployment, and no effects on schooling and welfare receipt.

The effects of family caps on the subsequent fertility decisions of never-married mothers

Family caps seek to reduce fertility among welfare recipients by denying additional cash assistance to recipients who have children while on welfare. A necessary condition for family caps to be an effective policy tool is that welfare recipients respond to financial incentives in making decisions that affect subsequent fertility outcomes. This paper uses data from the 2001 and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine whether welfare mothers respond to the incentive provided by the Aid to Families with Dependent Children/Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (AFDC/TANF) system in determining whether or not to have a second child. The results show no evidence that family caps have an effect on the subsequent childbearing of never married women.

Birth and Fortune Revisited: A Cohort Analysis of Underemployment, 1974–2004

The cohort is a key concept in the study of social demography and social change. The enduring influence of cohort membership can arise from history-based and/or size-based effects. The most prominent proponent of size-based cohort effects is Easterlin (Birth and fortune: The impact of numbers on personal welfare, 1980) who argues that individuals hailing from unusually large cohorts will experience adverse labor market conditions relative to the members of the smaller cohorts that bracket them. Drawing on data from the March Current Population Survey for the period spanning 1974–2004, we examine the influence of relative cohort size on underemployment. The results provide modest support for the Easterlin thesis, showing the odds of underemployment to be greatest among members of relatively large cohorts, net of other significant predictors. The results also show that the impact of relative cohort size differs by educational level, suggesting that adverse economic conditions produced by large cohort size can be offset by broader changes in the labor market and other social institutions.

Earnings mobility among Italian low-paid workers

This paper uses Italian panel data to analyse low pay transitions since the early 1990s. Results indicate that having more human capital reduces the probability of falling into low pay, but there is little impact on raising exit rates from low pay. Human capital effects are found to be larger for women than for men. There is considerable state dependence: the experience of low pay raises the probability of subsequent low pay episodes. Also, there is substantial unobserved heterogeneity associated with factors such as initial conditions, mobility out of the earnings distribution and educational attainment.