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

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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.

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Notes

  1. Data sources: Official website of World Values Survey. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/.

  2. Ibid.

  3. See The report on China's rule of law in 2014 written by Li and Tian (2014).

  4. See The annual report on the social mentality of China written by Wang (2013).

  5. Since CLDS only made statistics on the educational level of the respondents who received formal education, the cases of non-formal education were automatically treated as missing values; this paper excluded cases who did not receive formal education in the sample.

  6. The concept of ‘city’ in this study refers to the prefectural city, which is an administrative division of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that ranks below a province and above a county. It includes a main central urban area (a city in the usual sense) and its surrounding rural area.

  7. In the calculation of income inequality, this study used the variable of income reported by respondents from the raw data of CLDS, including 116 cities with 16,000 cases after removing missing value of income variable.

  8. The formulas of R 21 and R 22 referring to Multilevel Modeling were derived from Luke (2004).

  9. In this study, income inequality and its squares were intended to be included at the same time in the analysis of the happiness model, but no significant correlation was found between them and happiness. Thus, the results of that model were not reported.

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Acknowledgements

Data used in this paper is from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS) by the Center for Social Science Survey at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. Please refer to http://css.sysu.edu.cn for more information about the CLDS data. The author appreciates the assistance in providing data by the institute and the suggestions of anonymous reviewers; any errors are my own.

Funding

This study was funded by Social Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (GD17YSH02), Social Science Foundation of Guangzhou (2018GZGJ10), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2015XMS15).

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  1. School of Public Administration, South China University of Technology, Building No. 5, No. 381 Wushan Road, Tianhe District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China

    Jiawen Huang

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Huang, J. Income Inequality, Distributive Justice Beliefs, and Happiness in China: Evidence from a Nationwide Survey. Soc Indic Res 142, 83–105 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1905-4

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