Do Large Governments Decrease Happiness?

Tiago Sequeira, Tiago Minas and Alexandra Lopes ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Until now there was little evidence of the influence of large governments on happiness and when it existed, it was positive. We show that structural government consumption and other measures of long-term government imbalances significantly decrease happiness and life satisfaction in European countries. In some cases there is evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between the Government burden and happiness, for which the negative relationship begin just before the median. This evidence may lead European politicians to reject the idea that bigger Governments lead to higher people satisfaction and to win elections. This result is consistent with people valuing (negatively) expectations for future tax increases, macroeconomic imbalances, and austerity.

Keywords: Happiness; Life Satisfaction; Government Size; Fiscal Deficits; Public Debt; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 D60 H30 I31 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-hap and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/54418/1/MPRA_paper_54418.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:54418

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().