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The Impact of Government Size on Chinese Elders’ Life Satisfaction: 1998–2008

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A New Research Agenda for Improvements in Quality of Life

Part of the book series: Social Indicators Research Series ((SINS,volume 57))

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Abstract

Why are Chinese lagging behind in their reported levels of life satisfaction during a period of spectacular economic growth? This paper endeavors to investigate the impacts of government size on Chinese individuals’ reported life satisfaction levels. We apply ordered probit regressions to a unique data set of five rounds of surveys on Chinese individuals between 1998 and 2008, which interviews over 10,000 individuals who are located in 22 provinces.

In general we find strong evidence that government size has a detrimental impact on elders’ life satisfaction, in particular for rich residents and in more developed regions. We also find that GDP brings uneven outcomes to the population, with poor residents and those in rural and less developed regions being adversely affected, whilst rich residents enjoy the fruits of higher GDP per capita.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Other researchers find a “flat line” (for example, Crabtree and Wu (2011)’s Gallup report for 1999–2010).

  2. 2.

    Several theories such as relative position hypothesis and aspiration theory have been raised and subsequently tested by many researchers. (See survey papers by Frey and Stutzer 2002; Di Tella and MacCulloch 2006; Kahneman and Krueger 2006; Clark et al. 2008).

  3. 3.

    http://finance.ce.cn/rolling/201210/23/t20121023_16996977.shtml, accessed on March 23, 2015

  4. 4.

    http://centerforaging.duke.edu/design-and-method/survey-design

  5. 5.

    The cognitive status of interviewees is determined using the mini-mental state examination (MMSE; Folstein et al. 1975). The MMSE score ranges from 0 to 30, and people with scores of 18 or more are considered as being cognitively normal and those with scores less than 18 are categorized as cognitively impaired (Zeng et al. 2002). Cognitively impaired elders are dropped because they may not be able to appropriately address their feelings about life satisfaction.

  6. 6.

    The CLHLS started to question about household income and self-rated economic status since 2002. The question reads “What was the income per capita of your household last year?” in 2002 and 2005, then it was rephrased as “What was the total income of your household last year?” in 2008. Therefore we use income quartiles to replace the real household per capita income in the analysis.

  7. 7.

    We thank one of the anonymous referees on his/her insightful review and constructive suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. China Academy of Public Finance and Policy, The Central University of Finance and Economics, No. 39 Xueyuan Nanlu, Haidian District, Beijing, 100081, China

    Song Gao & Xiangyi Meng

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  1. Song Gao
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  2. Xiangyi Meng
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Correspondence to Xiangyi Meng .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Applicazioni “G. Parenti” (DiSIA), Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Statistica, Informa, Firenze, Italy

    Filomena Maggino

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Gao, S., Meng, X. (2015). The Impact of Government Size on Chinese Elders’ Life Satisfaction: 1998–2008. In: Maggino, F. (eds) A New Research Agenda for Improvements in Quality of Life. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 57. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15904-1_7

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