EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Income Inequality, Distributive Justice Beliefs, and Happiness in China: Evidence from a Nationwide Survey

Jiawen Huang ()
Additional contact information
Jiawen Huang: South China University of Technology

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2019, vol. 142, issue 1, No 4, 83-105

Abstract: Abstract Recently, increasing numbers of scholars have given attention to the mechanism connecting income inequality and happiness. This paper uses a multilevel model to verify the effect of income inequality at the city level on happiness and its moderating effect in China. It is found that income inequality is highly correlated to individual happiness. In the context of the transition China, people are inclined to report more happiness in places where income inequality is lower, after controlling for a number of demographic variables and economic factors. Moreover, this negative effect is relatively robust and significant, regardless of estimates with different covariates. It is worth noting that personal distributive justice beliefs play a momentous role in happiness. Specifically, as an effective social psychological mechanism, they can alleviate the negative effects of income inequality on happiness. A vital implication of the findings for social policy is that the model of economic development should be based on equity and justice and become a consistent source of happiness in this transitional period in China.

Keywords: Happiness; Income inequality; Distributive justice beliefs; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-018-1905-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:142:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s11205-018-1905-4

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-018-1905-4

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-02
Handle: RePEc:spr:soinre:v:142:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s11205-018-1905-4