The Association Between Perceived Income Inequality and Subjective Well-being: Evidence from a Social Survey in Japan

Previous studies have shown that income inequality in society is negatively associated with individuals subjective well-being (SWB), such as their perceived happiness and self-rated health (SRH). However, it is not realistic to assume that individuals have precise information about actual income distribution measured by the Gini coefficient or other statistical measures. In the current study, we examined how perceived income inequality, rather than actual inequality, was associated with SWB, using cross-sectional data collected from a nationwide, Internet survey conducted in Japan (N = 10,432). We also examined how this association was confounded by individuals’ objective and subjective income status, considering the possibility that individuals with lower income status are more inclined to both perceive income inequality and feel unhappy/unhealthy. In our analysis, we focused on the perception of widening income inequality (as perceived income inequality), perceived happiness and SRH (as SWB), and household income and living standards compared with 1 year ago and compared with others (as income status). We also controlled for personality traits. We obtained three key findings: (1) perceived income inequality was negatively associated with SWB; (2) both perceived income inequality and SWB were associated with income status; and (3) the association between perceived income inequality and SWB was attenuated after controlling for income status, but not fully for perceived happiness. These findings suggest that perceived income inequality, which links actual income inequality to SWB, should be further studied.     

Overeducation,Skills and Wage Penalty: Evidence for Spain Using PIAAC Data

Despite well documented high levels of socioeconomic inequalities, health gradients by socioeconomic status (SES) in contemporary China have been reported to be limited. Using data from the 2010–2012 China Family Panel Studies, we reexamine associations between three sets of SES—human capital, material conditions, and political capital—and self-rated health among Chinese adults 18–70 years old, capitalizing on anchoring vignette data to adjust for reporting heterogeneity. We find strong evidence of substantial variations in reporting behaviors by education, cognition, and family wealth but not by family income or political capital. Failing to correct for reporting heterogeneity can bias the estimates of SES gradients in self-rated health as much as nearly 40 %. After vignette adjustment, we find significantly positive associations of education, family income, wealth, and political capital with self-rated health. Individuals’ cognitive capacity, however, does not predict self-rated health.     

Socioeconomic Status,Income Inequality,and Health Complaints: A Basic Psychological Needs Perspective

Socioeconomic status (SES) and income inequality are now recognized as important determinants of health, and there is growing interest in uncovering the intermediary psychosocial pathways through which the socioeconomic context affects physical well-being (Marmot in The status syndrome: how social standing affects our health and longevity, Henry Holt, New York, 2004; Wilkinson and Pickett in The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better, Allen Lane, London, 2009). We adopted the applied framework of self-determination theory (SDT; Deci and Ryan in Psychol Inq 11:227–268, 2000) and hypothesized that fulfillment of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness would mediate the relationships that SES and income inequality have to self-rated health. An online community sample of American participants (N = 1,139) completed a detailed demographic survey and provided self-reports of need fulfillment and health complaints. Structural equation models controlled for impression management and self-deceptive enhancement. Controlling for sex and age, need fulfillment was predicted positively by subjective SES and objective household income and negatively by state-level income inequality; in turn, need fulfillment predicted lower levels of health complaints. These findings suggest that SDT provides a useful framework for the study of SES, income inequality, and health, and that basic psychological needs are an important mechanism through which socioeconomic contexts influence health.     

The Experience of Material and Emotional Hardship in Israel: Do Some Groups Cope Better than Others?

While official poverty measures tend to focus on income alone, measures of material hardship also incorporate aspects of need. Families experience material hardship when they have difficulty paying bills or buying things the household needs, such as food, medicine and medical care. The current study develops four measures of material and emotional hardship and focusses on two groups that have high risks of poverty in Israel, namely Israeli–Palestinians and Ultra-orthodox Jews—Haredim, and compares them with the non-Haredi Jewish majority. Comparing Israeli–Palestinians, Haredim and non-Haredi Jews provides an opportunity to study the intersection of poverty and group membership. Group membership may affect hardship because groups differ in living conditions, poverty histories, social networks, access to resources, and perceptions of needs. The study draws on Israel’s 2013 Social Survey, conducted by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (n = 7438). The findings point to substantial degrees of inequality among the disadvantaged. Although Haredim and Palestinians have similar levels of income-poverty, the study shows that the consequences of low-income in terms of deprivation and hardship are more severe among Israeli–Palestinians than among (Haredi and non-Haredi) Jews. Israeli–Palestinians experience higher levels of material and emotional hardship than Haredim after controlling for household income.     

Multidimensional Racial Inequality in the United States

This paper measures racial inequalities in the US using a multidimensional ‘wellbeing’ approach that simultaneously considers the distributions of income, health and education. The primary objective is to examine trends in US wellbeing inequality with an emphasis on changes in racial composition. Data is taken from 1990 to 2007 and we observe increases in income inequality, a decline in education inequality and unchanged health inequality over the period. Taken together, these results show a slight increase in the dispersion in multidimensional wellbeing. Stratifying by racial groups shows that this increase is due to widening intra-racial inequalities while inter-racial differences remained unchanged. The method is also used to evaluate wellbeing across groups and we estimate black wellbeing to average around 76 % of whites, while persons from other races average approximately 93 %. Some other changes in composition occur through time and the results are shown to be robust to a number of changes in parametric weightings.     

受教育程度与城镇居民收入不平等—基于基尼系数的分解研究

基于2008年中国综合社会调查的数据,本文运用基尼系数分解的方法研究城镇居民受教育程度对收入不平等的影响。基于回归的不平等分解研究发现受教育程度是导致城镇居民职业收入不平等的最主要因素。对基尼系数的亚组分解研究发现受教育程度不同的人群之闻的收入不平等对总体收入不平等的贡献率为8.65％,城镇居民职业收入不平等主要表现为各个受教育程度人群内部的收入不平等。分地区来看,中西部地区受教育程度较低的人群其组内差距的贡献率要远高于东部地区。实证研究的结果表明,提供平等的受教育机会、缩小受教育程度的不平等、加大对中西部地区义务教育的投入可以有效缩小收入不平等。     

Understanding the age and cause drivers of recent longevity trends in Australia

Longevity continues to increase in Australia. The period 1979–2011 saw increases in life expectancy at birth of 6.9 years to 84.7 years for females, and 9.5 years to 80.2 years for males. A decomposition analysis reveals that the majority of the increase, particularly for females, is attributable to mortality improvement at older ages, and that gains are being made at increasingly older ages over time. Improvements in circulatory disease mortality account for a very significant component of life expectancy gains over the period—75 % for females and 60 % for males—with land transport accidents, congenital and perinatal mortality, and neoplasms also making significant positive contributions. Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and lung neoplasms for females, have had a negative impact. Females currently outlive males by 4.5 years on average, with ischaemic heart disease and prostate and other neoplasms the important positive contributors to this differential, and breast cancer having a negative effect. With 93 % of females and 88 % of males now surviving to age 65 in Australia, continued life expectancy improvements will depend to a large extent on success in delaying death at the older ages.     

Welfare Costs of Inflation: Evidence from China

In this paper, we use the China General Social Survey 2010 data to estimate the impact of inflation on the welfare of residents. By using the happiness research approach, we find that on average, a 0.1 % rise in inflation rate will cause a welfare loss of about 73.0–164.1 RMB, mainly from unexpected inflation. Furthermore, welfare costs to different income groups vary significantly: for those whose household income reaches 100,000 RMB, the welfare loss resulted from a 0.1 % rise in inflation only reduces about 0.057 % of their income, while for the below 10 thousand income group, the cost is as high as 0.739 %. It also shows that there are substantial differences in different income groups’ sensitivities to different kinds of commodities. Specifically, low-income residents are seriously harmed by an increase in food and residence prices, whereas their middle-income counterparts are mainly affected by price changes in healthcare, personal articles, transportation, communication, recreation, and education. Besides, we find that subjective well-being of debtors are significantly boosted by inflation.     

The Benefits of Educational Attainment for U.S. Adult Mortality: Are they Contingent on the Broader Environment?

The growing recognition that educational attainment is one of the strongest preventive factors for adult health and longevity has fueled an interest in educational attainment as a population health strategy. However, less attention has been given to identifying social, economic, and behavioral resources that may moderate the health and longevity benefits of education. We draw on theories of resource substitution and multiplication to examine the extent to which the education–mortality association is contingent on other resources (marriage, employment, income, healthy lifestyles). We use data on adults aged 30–84 in the 1997–2006 National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File and estimate discrete-time event history models stratified by gender (N = 146,558; deaths = 10,399). We find that the mortality benefits of education are generally largest for adults—especially women—who have other resources such as employment and marriage, supporting the theory of resource multiplication. Nonetheless, our results also imply that other resources can potentially attenuate the mortality disadvantages (advantages) associated with low (high) levels of education. The findings suggest that efforts to improve population health and longevity by raising education levels should be augmented with strategies that assure widespread access to social, economic, and behavioral resources.     

Happiness Inequality: How Much is Reasonable?

We compute the Gini indexes for income, happiness and various simulated utility levels. Due to decreasing marginal utility of income, happiness inequality should be lower than income inequality. We find that happiness inequality is about half that of income inequality. To compute the utility levels we need to assume values for a key parameter that can be interpreted as a measure of relative risk aversion. If this coefficient is above one, as many economists believe, then a large part of happiness inequality is not related to pecuniary dimensions of life.     

Vertical and Horizontal Inequality in Ecuador: The Lack of Sustainability

We analyse the evolution of vertical and horizontal inequality in Ecuador in the long-run (1990–2016), as well as during and after the recent commodities boom (2005–2014). Using data from censuses, living standard measurement surveys, and employment surveys we show that Ecuador has made significant progress in reducing inequality, particularly since 2000. However, inequality has not decreased further since 2011. We argue that a key factor behind the reduction and ensuing stagnation of inequality is the dynamic of oil revenues, particularly regarding its effect on economic growth and on the financing of redistributive policies. Using the decomposition of the Gini coefficient by income source proposed by Lerman and Yitzhaki (Rev Econ Stat 67:151–156, 1985) we show that during the last decade there has been a shift away from market sources towards sources of income derived from government expenditures. Following the end of the commodities boom, this process is no longer sustainable. Indeed, we show that the underlying causes that led to the change in the sources of income started long before the end of the boom. The temporary shock following the 2008 financial crisis already affected the structure of Ecuador’s public finances and its current account. And, since around 2011, its institutions and labour market indicators have also deteriorated. We conclude that sustainable inequality reductions require improving the current institutions.

     

The changing contribution of smoking to educational inequality in female mortality

The negative association between education and mortality is well established in international research. The harmful effect of smoking on health is well known. However, the contribution of smoking to educational inequality in mortality varies across studies, and in some studies, the contribution is negligible. This paper demonstrates the use of an analytical approach to provide one explanation for this phenomenon. Analysing nationally representative survey data for two cohorts of Australian women born in 1920–1928 and 1945–1951 respectively, we found that in the 1994–2006 period, the less educated are subject to higher mortality by 38–50 %. In the total sample, the smoking contribution to excess mortality due to lower education is negligible. However, when the cohorts are analysed independently, the smoking contribution ranges from ?13 % among those born in 1920–1928 to +23 % among those born in 1945–1951. The smoking contribution is only seen in the cohort-specific analysis because smoking is more prevalent among tertiary degree holders in the earlier cohort but more prevalent among less educated women in the later cohort. The disaggregated analytical approach taken here deserves further attention in research on inequality.     

Materialism in Pedagogy Students in Chile

Many studies have used Richins and Dawson’s (J Consum Res 19: 303–316, 1992) Material Values Scale (MVS), applying it to different types of populations that exhibit a particular psychometric behavior, and showing little stability in their factorial structure. In the present study, 1,070 pedagogy students from the northern, central and southern regions of Chile answered the MVS. This sample was randomly divided in two. Using the first sub-sample (N = 539), an exploratory factorial analysis was carried out, from which a structure of nine items was grouped into two factors called “Social Success” and “Personal Happiness”, which presented adequate reliability. Later, with the second sub-sample (N = 531), the factorial structure indicated above was put to the test through a confirmatory factorial analysis. The data from the model show that the scale contains 8 items in total, grouped into two dimensions. The factorial loads are significant at the level of 1 %, which indicates that the 2-factor structure can be confirmed. Finally—using the proposed structure—the presence of the students’ material values was evaluated.     

Estimating Quality of Life and Place with Location Theory: The McBucks Index

This paper explores the changes in inequality and welfare between EU regions at the NUTS 3 level over the 2003–2011 period. Changes in absolute and relative inequalities are broken down into components explaining the effects of population change, re-ranking of regions and income growth between regional per capita incomes. Each component of inequality change is further decomposed by subgroup, revealing the contributions arising from changes within subgroups and from changes between subgroups. The decomposition of the change in absolute inequality is used to develop a decomposition of the change in welfare between EU regions.     

Food Access and Shocks in Rural Households: Evidence from Bangladesh and Ethiopia

As remarked by Ravallion (J Dev Econ 99:201–209, 2012), the recent switch from arithmetic to geometric mean in the aggregation of the United Nations’ Human Development Index has caused a more severe inequality penalization of the index for less developed countries, with outlying consequences. We clarify and explain this fact and propose an aggregation function, the Trichotomy Mean, that depends on two parameters: one regulates the overall penalization of disequilibria (among or within dimensions) in analogy with Atkinson’s inequality aversion parameter for power means; the other modulates the Level Dependence of the Adjustment, a novel concept describing the behavior—decreasing, increasing, or constant—of penalization of given disequilibria for increasing index level. Unlike the geometric mean (which, incidentally, has decreasing LDA type), the TM remains valid for zero or negative—and does not distort for small positive—values of the input variables, thus permitting less restrictive raw-variable normalizations and to overcome the need for exogenous lower bounds. We compare the three versions of TM with the geometric mean in an empirical analysis on the HDI 2014 data. We finally illustrate the contributions of the TM to the development literature debate.     

Mental Health of Transgender People in Hong Kong: A Community-Driven,Large-Scale Quantitative Study Documenting Demographics and Correlates of Quality of Life and Suicidality

A community-driven survey of 106 transgender people (the first such survey in Hong Kong) showed that: (1) more than half the sample (50.9%) had a university degree or higher qualification; (2) despite this, 43.4% had a monthly income below HK$6,000 (about USD$775); (3) 66% reported “fair” or “poor” quality of life; (4) 67% of the sample (87.1% of respondents aged 15–24 years) had contemplated suicide; and (5) 20.8% of the sample (35.5% of respondents aged 15–24 years) had attempted suicide. It was found that (1) those who were single, had a lower monthly income, and identified as transgender women reported lower quality of life; and (2) those who were younger and on a lower income expressed higher suicidality. The findings suggest that service providers and policy makers urgently need to address the mental health needs of transgender people, particular younger transgender people.     

农村内部收入不平等变动的成因——基于回归分解的研究途径

近年来中国农村居民收入持续增长,但是农村收入差距却持续扩大。采用回归分解的方法,利用吉林省农户抽样调查数据,对农村内部收入不平等及其变动趋势的成因进行分析。研究结果表明,劳动力投入、工资性收入和人力资本对农户收入的增加起到明显的作用;影响农村收入不平等水平的要素有劳动力投入、耕地、工资性收入、人力资本要素以及地区差异;耕地、工资性收入和劳动力投入对农村内部收入不平等的增加有显著影响,其中耕地的作用占51.60%,超过一半的解释能力,而教育对降低收入不平等水平有一定的作用。     

Money Buys Financial Security and Psychological Need Satisfaction: Testing Need Theory in Affluence

The most prominent theory to explain the curvilinear relationship between income and subjective well-being (SWB) is need theory, which proposes that increased income and wealth can lead to increased well-being in poverty because money is used to satisfy basic physiological needs. The present study tests the tenets of need theory by proposing that money can buy happiness beyond poverty if the money satisfies higher-order needs. Findings indicate that in older adults (n = 1,284), as economic standing rises, so do individual perceptions of financial security (a safety need), which in turn increases overall life satisfaction. Further, a path model tested the degree to which financial security and psychological need satisfaction mediated the path from economic standing to life satisfaction and demonstrated the complete mediation through higher-order needs—there was a 66% reduction in the direct link through financial security and a 34% reduction through psychological need satisfaction. Discussion focuses on how these mediation and path models extend need theory.     

The impact of wives’ earnings on income inequality: Issues and estimates

We estimate the extent to which rising family income inequality can be explained by changes in the earnings of married women. We develop a decomposition equation that separates single persons from married couples (decomposition by population group) and, for married couples, distinguishes the impact of wives' earnings from other sources of income (decomposition by income source). Despite the rising correlation between husbands' and wives' earnings, changes in wives' earnings do not explain a substantial portion of the increase in family income inequality. Our results contradict those of some previous analyses. The inconsistency of recent estimates can be traced to the use of a variety of conceptually different approaches in the previous literature. We clarify these approaches by explicitly distinguishing the conceptual issues, analyzing the empirical components, and providing comprehensive estimates.