Happiness of Chinese in selected Asia countries: the role of income and culture

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• 研討會日期 : 2019-08-13
• 時間 : 14:30
• 主講人 : Professor Hock-Eam Lim
• 主持人 : Professor Daigee Shaw
• 地點 : Conference Room B110
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Lim received his Ph.D. in Economics from Monash University, Clayton Campus, Melbourne, Australia in 2008. He is currently an Associate Professor of Economics in Universiti Utara Malaysia. His research fields are Econometrics, Labor Economics, and Development Economics.
• 演講摘要 : The diaspora of Chinese ethnicity is the most extensive. This is evidenced by the existence of Chinese community, either small or large, in almost every parts of the world including the South-East Asia. Although the cultural assimilations occur to the oversea Chinese, the core values of Chinese culture are still mostly inherited. This enables a comparative study of the role of culture in happiness among the Chinese. The China puzzle (falling happiness in a rising income), East-Asian happiness gap, and Easterlin’s income-happiness paradox have pointed out happiness, income and culture, are the variables of interest. The present study is inspired by Chen, Oparina and Powdthavee (2019) who have examined the invalid use of mean happiness regression. This highlights the limited usefulness of the mean happiness regression. Indeed, the factors that associated with happiness at the lower or higher percentile are equally important, if not more than the happiness at mean or median. Surprisingly, this nonlinearity of happiness is largely ignored in the literature. The present study aims to estimate the factors that relate to the different percentile of happiness using the logistic quantile regression. The data of World Values Surveys that consists of Chinese in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore are employed. Results reveals that overall, income has positive and significant influence on happiness. However, this positive effect is decreasing over the happiness distribution. The income effect even turns into insignificant for Malaysian and Hong Kong Chinese who are in the top 75th percentile of happiness. Thus, for those who are in low happiness, increase of income will increase the happiness; for those who are in high happiness, increase of income will not increase the happiness. The effect of income is influential only at low level happiness distribution. The effects of cultural values are also found to be diminishing over the happiness distribution. Overall, the values play more important role for Chinese who are in low happiness than those in high happiness. Relatively, the values of trust, freedom and fairness, are the significant factors across the happiness distribution among the Chinese.