How Interdependent are Cross-Country Happiness Dynamics?

Tapas Mishra, Mamata Parhi and Raul Fuentes

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2015, vol. 122, issue 2, 518 pages

Abstract: We characterize evolution of cross-country happiness dynamics by two important factors. The first one concerns inertia, which we model in a non-linear and stochastic environment to reflect on how an agent’s own past level of happiness adapts to the current level. Second, we allow an explicit role of socio-economic ‘distance’ in facilitating dynamic interdependence among happiness levels. A series of hypotheses are tested on a long-time series data for a sample of twelve European countries. We find that inertia has a strong positive and non-linear effect on countries’ steady-state happiness convergence. The effects are more pronounced when relative income and macroeconomic variables are allowed to determine the correlation structure of happiness. The main novelty is the consideration of spatio-temporal dynamic aspects of happiness where complementarity in the latter across economies is rigorously tested and established. We find that after accounting for the effects of heterogenous socio-economic dynamics, cross-country happiness is indeed complementary: a unit rise in happiness level in one country raises happiness in others. Our analytical model and empirical findings have interesting socio-economic policy implications. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Inertia; Happiness persistence; Relative income; Convergence; Spatial dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11205-014-0692-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:soinre:v:122:y:2015:i:2:p:491-518

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-014-0692-9

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().