Exploring the Dynamics of Subjective Well-being in China: The Evolving Impact of Economic and Non-economic Factors

Abstract

Improving residents' well-being is an important goal of each national government. Mastering the factors affecting subjective well-being and its changing characteristics is an inevitable means to achieve this goal. Most existing studies focus on the happiness paradox, and many static studies use cross-sectional data that mainly study the relationship between income and subjective well-being. Using data from the World Values Survey from 1990 to 2018, this study analyzes the factors that influence the subjective well-being of the Chinese people and focuses on the importance of each factor and its law of change over time. The study found that both economic factors and non-economic factors had significant effects on subjective well-being. In the early stage, the impact of absolute income on subjective well-being occupied the most important position. With the continuous improvement of the economic level, the importance of relative income, democracy, fairness, pride of nationality, leisure, trust, emotion, and other factors gradually increased. In contrast, the importance of absolute income declined. In addition, through the heterogeneity test, we found that high-income groups pay more attention to non-economic factors. In comparison, middle and low-income groups pay more attention to absolute income. The robustness test further confirms the reliability of the above conclusion, which also reveals that in current China, most people still have great economic pressure, and the Chinese government needs to make long-term efforts to improve the disposable income of the people.