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Journal of Happiness Studies
Published in: Journal of Happiness Studies 2/2015

01-04-2015 | Research Paper

Are Immigrant Wives Happy in Taiwan? A Look at the Role of Bargaining Power Within the Married Couples

Authors: Hung-Hao Chang, Pei-An Liao

Published in: Journal of Happiness Studies | Issue 2/2015

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Abstract

As has occurred in many developed countries, Taiwanese women have gradually become more highly educated and increasingly participated in the labor market. Consequently, Taiwanese women are becoming more independent and are choosing not to get married. As a result, more Taiwanese men have married women from mainland China and Southeast Asian countries. This study contributes to this interesting topic by investigating the happiness of immigrant wives in Taiwan. Special attention is paid to the role of bargaining power plays in immigrant wives’ happiness. A nationwide survey of 10,153 immigrant wives in 2008 and a two-stage econometric regression framework were used in this study; the results show that the socio-demographic characteristics of the immigrant wives and their Taiwanese husbands are significantly associated with the immigrant wives’ bargaining power and happiness. Immigrant wives with greater bargaining power are happier.
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Footnotes
1
The term “foreign brides” is more commonly used in Taiwan’s society, but it may reflect discrimination against women from the developing countries (Hsia 2009). Hence, we use the term “immigrant wives” in this study instead.
 
2
Our findings should be interpreted with caution. The point raised by an anonymous reviewer is that the happiness levels of the immigrant wives in our dataset may be over-reported because the survey was conducted by the Ministry of the Interior. Since the 2008 SFMCSLC is the only nationally representative dataset containing the immigrant wives’ happiness levels, we are unable to compare our findings to that of other nation-wide surveys to further address this issue.
 
3
Our study is relevant to the previous literature that examined the relationship between income and happiness. However, to include the absolute income variable in our empirical analysis is not possible because the absolute income variable is highly correlated with the bargaining power variable, which is defined as relative income. In the preliminary analysis, in addition to the bargaining power (relative income) variable, we also included the married couple’s total wage income, and then estimated a linear model for immigrant wife’s happiness equation. The Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) value was found as large as 12.37. Without too much surprise, this evidence points to the multicollinearity problem when both the absolute and relative income variables are considered at the same time. We thank one anonymous reviewer for this observation.
 
4
The immigrant wives who reported no wage income could be either unemployed or retired. Because our dataset contained no information on the detailed job categories, we cannot further separate no-wage-income immigrant wives into either unemployed or retired group. However, due to the strict labor regulations in place on the immigrant wives to enter the job market in Taiwan, we expect that most of the immigrant wives without a wage income are those who are not eligible to obtain a work permit. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.
 
5
We appreciated the thoughtful suggestion from an anonymous reviewer to use the fractional model. Compared to the commonly used Tobit model (Tobin 1958), the fractional model has certain advantages. For example, the Tobit model is appropriate for describing the censored data in the interval [0, 1]. However, its application to data defined only in that interval is not easy to justify. That is, zero bargaining power is a consequence of individual choices and not of censoring. Moreover, the Tobit model requires normality assumption, prior to censoring (Ramalho et al. 2011).
 
6
In our sample, approximately 35 % of the immigrant wives had no wage income and less than 2 % of them were responsible for the total household income. Therefore, we specified a two-part fractional regression model with observations of zero value.
 
7
Our findings should be interpreted with caution. It is possible that immigrant wives are happier because they migrated into a place where they can live according to a higher standard of living. In other words, immigrant wives with high bargaining power may not be happier solely because of this power but because those with higher bargaining power live in higher income households. However, as mentioned in footnote 3, to include the absolute income variable to separate the effects between bargaining power and living standards in our model is difficult due to multicollinearity. We thank this critical point raised by an anonymous reviewer.
 
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Metadata
Title
Are Immigrant Wives Happy in Taiwan? A Look at the Role of Bargaining Power Within the Married Couples
Authors
Hung-Hao Chang
Pei-An Liao
Publication date
01-04-2015
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Journal of Happiness Studies / Issue 2/2015
Print ISSN: 1389-4978
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7780
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-014-9510-y

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