Self-assessed well-being and economic rank in South Africa

Dorrit Posel

Development Southern Africa, 2014, vol. 31, issue 1, 51-64

Abstract: This study explores subjective measures of well-being in South Africa collected in the first two waves of the National Income Dynamics Study. These subjective measures include individual life satisfaction, current self-assessed economic rank and expected economic rank in the future. The paper describes how the distributions of these measures have changed over the course of the panel and it investigates the relationship between life satisfaction and perceived economic rank in a multivariate context, controlling for individual fixed effects. The panel data suggest a leftward shift in the distribution of life satisfaction over the two waves. Moreover, the majority of adults did not perceive their economic rank as having improved and they reported lower expectations of future upward economic mobility. Perceptions of current and future economic rank are key correlates of life satisfaction, findings that remain robust to controls for unobserved individual heterogeneity.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0376835X.2013.851020 (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:taf:deveza:v:31:y:2014:i:1:p:51-64

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CDSA20

DOI: 10.1080/0376835X.2013.851020

Access Statistics for this article

Development Southern Africa is currently edited by Marie Kirsten

More articles in Development Southern Africa from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().