Subjective Well-Being and Relative Poverty in Rural Bangladesh

M Asadullah and Nazmul Chaudhury ()
Additional contact information
Nazmul Chaudhury: World Bank

No 6569, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: poverty; well-being; institutions; Bangladesh (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I30 I31 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2012-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Psychology, 2012, 33 (5), 940 - 950

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6569.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Subjective well-being and relative poverty in rural Bangladesh (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6569

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().