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Journal of Happiness Studies

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19.11.2015 | Research Paper

Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being and Poverty: An Economic Perspective

verfasst von: Khadija Shams

Erschienen in: Journal of Happiness Studies | Ausgabe 6/2016

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Abstract

Drawing on unique survey data for rural Pakistan, we estimate a happiness model to explore to what extent an economic perspective adds to our understanding of subjective wellbeing poverty. The data elicits information on subjective well-being in general and particularly on financial well-being in terms of household’s happiness with the current income or expenditure. We find that the well-being approach closely depicts the idea of well-being poverty in terms of the level education, health and income which matter significantly. Moreover unlike developed nations this study suggests a positive impact of children on well-being and poverty due to their productive contribution. As studies employing good data from developing countries are rare, this paper can potentially make a good contribution to the existing happiness literature, with special reference to Pakistan. Secondly, it brings new and strong empirical evidence to alternative approaches to subjective well-being poverty.

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In order to simplify concepts, we shall use the terms happiness and subjective well-being (SWB) and life satisfaction interchangeably.

The MPI aims to capture basically the three dimensions of poverty - health, education and standard of living of a household (Alkire 2010).

Sen introduced the capabilities approach to well-being and poverty which sought to emphasize a person’s ability to achieve various valuable functions as part of living and thus focuses more on psychological rather than material deprivation.

The household head or its main member were asked the questions.

There is no household in the sample without any children.

As pointed by Sen (1997), education can be beneficial for an individual by increasing their capabilities: reading, communicating, being able to choose in a more informed way and so on. We include education of the respondent in the model and found that it plays a positive role in household’s perception of well-being.

The linktest for the baseline Model (1), using the overall well-being metric, is statistically insignificant as shown in Table 6 which suggests that there are no omitted relevant variables and that our link function is correctly specified. Seeking to ensure that all models are properly specified, we moreover conducted the linktest (or specification error test) for each of the ordered probit regressions. The idea of the linktest, loosely speaking, is that if the model is properly specified, one should not be able to find any additional predictors that are statistically significant. The variable _hat should thus be a statistically significant predictor since it is the predicted value from the model. This will be the case unless the model is misspecified. On the other hand, if our model is properly specified, _hatsq should not have much predictive power except by chance. Therefore, the linktest is significant for a significant _hatsq. Such a test outcome would usually suggest that either we have an omitted-variable bias or it might be the case that the link function is not correctly specified.

The output reported in Table 8 suggests, the model is properly specified, also in terms of the joint significance of the children dummies.

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Titel: Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being and Poverty: An Economic Perspective
verfasst von: Khadija Shams
Publikationsdatum: 19.11.2015
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Journal of Happiness Studies / Ausgabe 6/2016
Print ISSN: 1389-4978
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7780
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-015-9691-z

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