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Estimating Worldwide Life Satisfaction ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 65 (2008) 35– 47 available at www.sciencedirect.com www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon METHODS Estimating worldwide life satisfaction Saamah Abdallah⁎, Sam Thompson, Nic Marks nef (the new economics foundation) ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Whilst studies of life satisfaction are becoming more common-place, their global coverage is Received 1 August 2007 far from complete. This paper develops a new database of life satisfaction scores for 178 Received in revised form countries, bringing together subjective well-being data from four surveys and using 5 November 2007 stepwise regression to estimate scores for nations where no subjective data are available. Accepted 12 November 2007 In doing so, we explore various factors that predict between-nation variation in subjective life satisfaction, building on Vemuri and Costanza's (Vemuri, A.W., & Costanza, R., 2006. The Keywords: role of human, social, built, and natural capital in explaining life satisfaction at the country Life satisfaction level: toward a National Well-Being Index (NWI). Ecological Economics, 58:119–133.) four Quality of life capitals model. The main regression model explains 76% of variation in existing subjective scores; importantly, this includes poorer nations that had proven problematic in Vemuri and Costanza's (Vemuri, A.W., & Costanza, R., 2006. The role of human, social, built, and natural capital in explaining life satisfaction at the country level: toward a National Well- Being Index (NWI). Ecological Economics, 58:119–133.) study. Natural, human and socio- political capitals are all found to be strong predictors of life satisfaction. Built capital, operationalised as GDP, did not enter our regression model, being overshadowed by the human capital and socio-political capital factors that it inter-correlates with. The final database presents a stop-gap resource that, until robust surveys are carried out worldwide, allows comparisons of subjective life satisfaction between nations to be made with reasonable confidence. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction 07/2007) found almost 4300 published articles mentioning either the topic “life satisfaction” or “subjective well-being”, of Whilst the notion that subjective well-being is the fundamental which over half were published since the year 2000. The Jour- good has a long history, subjective measures of well-being nal of Happiness Studies has been an outlet for much of this have been slow to gain credibility within policy circles. Instead, research, but there have also been regular publications in objective measures of well-being have been accepted as journals such as Social Indicators Research and Ecological proxies – most obviously GDP and supplemented GDP indica- Economics (for reviews of the burgeoning literature, see Diener tors such as the Human Development Index (HDI – Desai, 1991 et al., 1999; Layard, 2005). Research suggests that people can and the UNDP) – with the tacit assumption that there is no answer questions regarding their life satisfaction reliably and reliable way to monitor an individual's subjective well-being. that these data have acceptable validity, including construct However, academic interest in the study of subjective well- validity (Diener et al., 1999). Recently, Kingdon and Knight being has grown rapidly in recent years. A literature search in (2006) have argued that subjective life satisfaction may be the the Social Sciences Citation Index of the Web of Science (on 11/ single most effective measure of poverty in developing ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Abdallah). 0921-8009/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.11.009 36 ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 65 (2008) 35– 47 countries, encompassing both economic and social aspects of nations. They found that positivity – i.e. the tendency to report well-being. aspects of life in general as being good – was associated with Although there is reasonable consensus about the utility of the extent to which positive feelings and emotions were subjective life satisfaction as an intra-nation measure, themselves seen as being valuable and worthwhile (Diener attempts to compare absolute levels of life satisfaction across et al., 2000). For example, Latin American respondents showed nations have proven more problematic. Conceptually, some strong normative beliefs about the value of positive feelings, have argued against the validity of cross-cultural comparisons in addition to reporting markedly higher-than-average levels of subjective scales on the basis of reference groups effects of life satisfaction. A striking example of this kind of cultural (Heine et al., 2002) and response bias due to cultural dif- variation is given by Eid and Diener (2001), who found that ferences (Triandis, 2002). some 83% of Australians and Americans viewed all positive The first of these problems, reference group effects, is emotions as inherently desirable, compared with only 9% of under-researched in the current literature. The relatively few Chinese holding the same view. In all of these cases, papers to have addressed it directly with appropriate data differences in cultural norms and values influence how people have focused on personal income comparisons (for a recent report feeling about their lives. review see Clark et al., in press). Income is, of course, an A third problem is response biases caused by social important dimension of inter-personal comparison, but it is desirability. The suggestion here is that widely shared values far from being the only one. At the international level, such as personal modesty, an emphasis on collectivism over moreover, it might be expected that reference group effects individualism, or a desire to “stand out from the crowd” may within nations would largely disappear (unless it could be cause survey respondents in different countries to report shown convincingly that the main comparators for residents subjective life satisfaction that does not accurately reflect of a given country are people in other nations). Nonetheless, their true feelings. This is implied by evidence that the shape given the paucity of empirical evidence that speaks directly to of the distribution of life satisfaction responses differs the issue of reference group effects, it is difficult to say much between cultures; Chen et al. (1995), for instance, found that other than to acknowledge it as a potential limitation of any Japanese and Taiwanese students were less likely than analysis based on subjective life satisfaction. American students to use the extremes of the response The question of cultural differences, by contrast, has been scale. Oishi (2002) used experience-sampling to compare the subject to a good deal of empirical scrutiny and must be day-to-day and remembered well-being of Asian–Americans highlighted as a potentially significant limitation to any cross- and Caucasian Americans. No differences were found in day- national comparisons of subjective life satisfaction. There are to-day reports, yet Asian Americans reported lower overall several distinct aspects of culture difference that have been well-being when later asked to recall how they had felt over explored, which can be grouped into three broad areas: 1) the whole of the same period. translation and commensurability of concepts; 2) variation in To what extent do these problems cast doubt on the utility the relative importance of different aspects of life; and 3) of inter-national comparisons of life satisfaction? A fair response bias attributable to cultural norms and values. response would probably be that whilst there is little doubt Difficulty in translation is a well-known problem in cultural effects exist, their power has not been systematically international surveys because languages do not map onto documented at the aggregate level. Diener and Suh (2000) have one another precisely. Words carry nuances and implications noted various studies which support the cross-cultural that can make exact translation difficult. However, most validity of self-reports, by demonstrating correlation with a large international surveys attempt to deal with the problem variety of non-self-report measures. Fahey and Smyth (2004) by employing some form of back translation (i.e. translating have argued that a good deal of international variation in the survey into a second language, asking an independent subjective indicators can be explained by absolute differences translator to render it back into the original language and in welfare, thus implying that they are valid tools at this level then comparing the results). Veenhoven (1993) and Shao of analysis. In itself, correlation with objective welfare (1993) both examined results from different translations conditions does not imply that cultural effects are irrelevant, of life satisfaction surveys within bilingual communities; although it does suggest that their magnitude is not so great as neither found evidence of significant discrepancy in to completely obscure other relationships.1 In any case, it responses. Russell and Sato (1995) used pictorial representa- should not be assumed that all variation attributable to tions of different emotions and found that translations of cultural differences is “error” or response bias. There may emotion words like “happy” were interpreted the same way well be cultural differences that have a genuine impact on in English, Japanese and Chinese. Extant evidence, although
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