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Are Poor People Less Happy? Findings from Melanesia

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  • Feeny, Simon
  • McDonald, Lachlan
  • Posso, Alberto

Abstract

Measures of happiness are increasingly being used to inform development policy. This is particularly true in Melanesia where linkages between income and life satisfaction can be weak due to the dominance of semi-subsistence lifestyles. This paper examines the happiness of households in two Melanesian countries: Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The focus is on whether the poor are less happy. Findings indicate that wealth, increases in earnings, relative wealth, employment, and living on communally owned land are positively associated with happiness. Household size and food insecurity have a negative association. There is also strong support for poor households being less happy.

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  • Feeny, Simon & McDonald, Lachlan & Posso, Alberto, 2014. "Are Poor People Less Happy? Findings from Melanesia," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 448-459.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:64:y:2014:i:c:p:448-459
    DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.06.022
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    Cited by:

    1. Alberto Posso & Simon Feeny, 2016. "Beyond enrolments: the determinants of primary-school attendance in Melanesia," Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(4), pages 531-548, October.
    2. Jigme Nidup & Simon Feeny & Ashton Silva, 2018. "Improving Well-Being in Bhutan: A Pursuit of Happiness or Poverty Reduction?," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 140(1), pages 79-100, November.
    3. VAN DEN BROECK, Goedele & MAERTENS, Miet, 2015. "Does Off-farm Employment Make Women in Rural Senegal Happy?," Working Papers 232593, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Centre for Agricultural and Food Economics.
    4. Miaomiao Liu & Yining Huang & Rosemary Hiscock & Qin Li & Jun Bi & Patrick L. Kinney & Clive E. Sabel, 2016. "Do Climate Change Policies Promote or Conflict with Subjective Wellbeing: A Case Study of Suzhou, China," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 13(3), pages 1-16, March.
    5. Forzani, Liliana & García Arancibia, Rodrigo & Llop, Pamela & Tomassi, Diego, 2018. "Supervised dimension reduction for ordinal predictors," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 136-155.
    6. Ferdi Botha & Edwin Wouters & Frikkie Booysen, 2018. "Happiness, Socioeconomic Status, and Family Functioning in South African Households: a Structural Equation Modelling Approach," Applied Research in Quality of Life, Springer;International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies, vol. 13(4), pages 947-989, December.
    7. Sara Miñarro & Victoria Reyes-García & Shankar Aswani & Samiya Selim & Christopher P Barrington-Leigh & Eric D Galbraith, 2021. "Happy without money: Minimally monetized societies can exhibit high subjective well-being," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(1), pages 1-15, January.

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