Gender, religion and happiness

Abstract

Using an infrequently used sample of 60 countries this paper attempts to gauge the importance of religion and gender on the levels of happiness across countries, after controlling for a set of quality of life variables. The results suggest that both religion which is represented by the degree of religious fractionalization, and gender as represented by the percentage of women in parliament, have important effects on the degree of happiness. Specifically the paper finds that higher levels of religious fractionalization reduce happiness, but greater representation of women in parliament robustly increase happiness levels.

Introduction

The recent recognition among economists about the important potential linkages between the degree of happiness exhibited by a country's population and economic outcomes has resulted in a growing stream of research that has been usefully summarized in Frey and Stutzer (2002). These studies broadly confirm the important ways happiness is intertwined with labor market outcomes (Clark et al., 2001), inflation and unemployment (Di Tella et al., 2001), mental health (Murphy and Athanasou, 1999), productivity (Veenhoven, 1988), marriage and divorce and therefore poverty levels (Veenhoven, 1988), suicide rates and resulting lost output (Koivumaa-Honkanen et al., 2001), crime and social unrest (Myers, 2000), income (Easterlin, 1995, Easterlin, 2001a), income inequality (Alesina et al., 2001) and overall economic performance (Oswald, 1997), to name a few. Thus raising levels of societal happiness has come to be viewed as an important goal of policymakers.¹ But raising levels of happiness in turn require an understanding of the factors that significantly impact the levels of happiness. This paper is an attempt to contribute to this growing body of literature. Specifically the paper uses happiness survey data for a group of 60 countries, and assesses the important role that quality of life variables play in determining the level of happiness. In addition and uniquely the paper goes a step further by attempting to gauge the contribution of religion and gender to levels of happiness. To the best of our knowledge no other paper has attempted to do this.

The exploration of the nexus between happiness levels and religion is motivated by recent research which point to important ways in which religion impacts economic growth and development and thereby income and presumably has the potential to impact happiness levels (Guiso et al., 2003, Barro and McCleary, 2001). In addition the role of gender has been highlighted in recent literature because gender has been found to improve service delivery and governance infrastructure across countries which has the potential to raise happiness levels (Mookerjee, 2002).

Our results confirm that both religion and gender have important effects on the level of happiness across countries in our sample. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we discuss the variables used to proxy for quality of life, religion and gender. In Section 3 we present the model to be estimated with a discussion of the happiness data. In Section 4 we discuss the empirical results with an eye towards distinguishing between statistical significance and economic significance as noted by (McCloskey and Ziliak, 1996). Section 5 contains some concluding remarks.