Market Openness, Transition Economies and Subjective Wellbeing

The informal elements in social institutions so far receive less attention. Some authors (Inglehart and Klingemann 2000) uses religious population (protestants versus others) as a proxy of cultural values to assess different levels of happiness across countries, which can be considered as an exploration of informal aspects of institutional influences. Schwartz and Melech (2000) propose to evaluate the effects of individualist values on worries. Yet to the knowledge of the author, effective measurement of informal institutions is not available. The current study decides to not engage in necessary empirical testing.

Rather, Inglehart and Klingemann (2000) suggest for a reverse causality that sharp declines in SWB might precede major institutional change (p. 177; also Inglehart and Siemienska 1988).

The index designed by the Heritage Foundation had been used in the cited studies of Ruut Veenhoven (2000, 2005; see also Ott 2005; Ovaska and Takashima 2006).

The analyzed countries are listed as follows: Albania*(a), Algeria*(c), Argentina(a), Armenia(a), Australia(b), Austria(b), Azerbaijan(a), Bangladesh(a), Belarus(c), Belgium(b), Bosnia(NA), Brazil(a), Bulgaria(a), Canada(b), Chile(b), China(c), Colombia(b), Croatia(a), Czech(a), Denmark(b), Egypt*(a), El Salvador(a), Estonia(c), Finland(b), France(b), Georgia(c), Germany(b), Ghana(b), Greece(b), Hungary(a), India(c), Indonesia*(b), Iran*(c), Ireland(b), Israel(b), Italy(b), Japan(b), Jordan*(b), Latvia(a), Lithuania(a), Luxembourg(b), Macedonia(a), Malta(c), Mexico(a), Moldavia(a), Morocco*(b), Netherlands(b), New Zealand(a), Nigeria(c), Norway(b), Pakistan(c), Peru(a), Philippines(a), Poland(a), Portugal(b), Romania(a), Russia(c), Serbia(c), Singapore(b), Slovakia(a), Slovenia(a), South Africa(a), Spain(b), Sweden(b), Switzerland(b), Taiwan(b), Tanzania*(NA), Turkey(a), Uganda*(a), Ukraine(c), United Kingdom(b), United States of America(b), Uruguay(a), Venezuela(c), Vietnam*(b), Zimbabwe*(c). Countries with an asterisk are not used in analysis of happiness. With regards to classification of countries by market openness, (a) denotes “close to open,” (b) “open to open,” and (c) “close to close”; (NA): not applicable due to lack of information.

There are 28 countries classified as closed to open economies, 31 as ‘always open’ economies, and 15 as ‘always closed’ economies. Two countries (Bosnia and Tanzania) lack information. See footnote 4 for the detailed reports.

Since Latin American countries that we sampled in this study were all classified as “open,” the significant influence of this regional dummy can be interpreted as being in favor of the market openness hypothesis.

Interaction effects were not found to be significant for the open year with the former Soviet region as well as with other controls. These statistical outcomes are not shown to save space.

For happiness in the 1990s, EE as a whole scored 5.9, compared to 7.2 in other countries. For life satisfaction, the difference was slightly larger, with the former scoring 5.5, compared to 6.9 in others.

More specifically, weights of \( \sqrt{n_{j}} \) were used where n _j is the population for the country j.

The findings from these statistical simulations should be used not as the primary evidence, but as supporting findings. These estimation results are not shown to save space (available upon request).

The data was accessed at http://​www.​stanford.​edu/​~wacziarg/​downloads/​liberalization.​xls. Accessed 28 July 2007.