Gender, religion and happiness
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.
Section snippets
Variable selection
Several variables are used as a proxy for the quality of life across countries. The quality of life factors chosen include the human development index (HDI), the Gastil Index of Civil Liberty (Gastil Index), and Index of Economic Freedom (Economic Freedom), the Gini Coefficient of Income Inequality (Gini), the Corruption Perceptions Index (Corruption). To explore the relationship between religion and happiness we use an index of religious fragmentation (Religious Fragmentation). Gender is
The model
To test our hypothesis that the level of happiness across countries is influenced by a set of quality of life variables together with religion and gender as discussed in the previous section, we employ cross sectional analysis. Specifically, the degree of happiness in each country is regressed on our measure of religion and gender and the set of quality of life variables. The equation estimated takes the following form:
where,
Empirical results
Equations 1–6 in Table 2 present the empirical results. All the equations are run with a dummy variable to represent different continents and capture any systematic differences in happiness levels due to location specific factors. However, the continental dummy was found to be always insignificant so we do not report the coefficients in Table 2.6
Conclusion
Using a sample of 60 countries – industrialized and developing – we document several interesting findings. First we show that indeed both religion and gender have important linkages to the level of happiness in a country. Specifically we document that greater levels of religious diversity, as measured by an index of religious fragmentation, reduces the level of happiness. Second our results strongly support a finding that greater participation by women in politics is justified. Third our
Acknowledgement
We wish to thank an anonymous referee for comments that have substantially improved the paper.
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