رفاه ذهنی و فقر نسبی در مناطق روستایی بنگلادش

This paper revisits the debate over the importance of absolute vs. relative income as a correlate of subjective well-being using data from Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world with high levels of corruption and poor governance. We do so by combining household data with population census and village survey records. Our results show that conditional on own household income, respondents report higher satisfaction levels when they experience an increase in their income over the past years. More importantly, individuals who report their income to be lower than their neighbours in the village also report less satisfaction with life. At the same time, our evidence suggests that relative wealth effect is stronger for the rich. Similarly, in villages with higher inequality, individuals report less satisfaction with life. However, when compared to the effect of absolute income, these effects (i.e. relative income and local inequality) are modest. Amongst other factors, we study the influence of institutional quality. Institutional quality, measured in terms of confidence in police, matters for well-being: it enters with a positive and significant coefficient in the well-being function.

Of late, there has been a spate of economic investigations on the determinants of subjective life-satisfaction. Arguing that life-satisfaction scores provide a measure of true utility,1 findings of these studies have been used to highlight both economic and non-economic aspects of individual well-being. Evidence suggests that relative to income, influence of other factors is either of equal or even greater importance. This is a promising line of inquiry in the context of the existing debate on the multidimensionality of poverty. Life-satisfaction research, by way of jointly studying the role of institutions, belief system, income and, economic inequality and so on, provides a convenient way to compare and contrast economic and non-economic factors in determining individual well-being. If well-being cannot be defined in the commodity space, the influence of income vis-à-vis that of non-income variables should be modest. To this end, research using developed country data finds that non-income related factors matter as well. Well-being is lower in countries where inflation is high, institutions are of poor quality (Helliwell, 2003 and Helliwell, 2006) and, inequality is high (Alesina, Di Tella, & MacCulloch, 2004).2 Cross-country analysis on the correlates of well-being reveals that even after holding income constant, difference in happiness is explained by unemployment level in the economy (Clark & Oswald, 1994) and level of trust in the society (Helliwell & Putnam, 2004; Helliwell and Huang, 2009; Helliwell & Wang, 2011).