Climate and Happiness in the Tropics

Arief Yusuf, Martin Siyaranamual (), Aisyah Ghina () and Megananda Suryana

ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association

Abstract: Despite the increasing number of studies on self-reported happiness, due to data availability, only a few studies from developing countries exist. Moreover, even though climate is among the most important input to human activities, only a handfull of studies explicitly associate it with self-reported wellbeing. This paper combines a survey of 17,000 individuals representing 85% of Indonesian population and GIS data on local climate to establish a causation between climate variables (temperature and rainfalls) on individual subjective well-being. We found that happiness is not associated with temperature, as expected because tropical country like Indonesia does not have much temperature variation. However, rainfall is found to significantly associated with self-reported happiness. We found that the relationship is not linear, where higher rainfall is associated with more happiness but it reduces it after some point. Policy implications are discussed.

Keywords: climate; subjective-well-being; happiness; Indonesia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q29 R19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-hap and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www-sre.wu.ac.at/ersa/ersaconfs/ersa16/Paper165_AisyahGhina.pdf (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:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa16p165

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gunther Maier ().