Unlocking Happiness: Socioeconomic Determinants Across Selected Asian Countries

Abstract

The current study was conducted to examine the factors that contribute to happiness of the individuals in selected Asian countries. The panel data from year 2006 to 2023 of thirty Asian countries were collected from world Happiness Report (WHR), World Development Indicator (WDI) and KOF Index. Two models were constructed, and in each model, happiness was used as a dependent variable with thirteen independent variables (viz., social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, perception of corruption, private consumption, inflation, unemployment, government expenditure and globalization, economic globalization, social globalization and political globalization) in both models. The results of both the models were attained via Fixed Effect technique. In both the models, one social factor: social support and one economic factor: government expenditures appeared to be statistically significant positive determinants of happiness, whereas, three economic factors (viz., inflation, unemployment and private consumption) appeared as statistically significant negative determinants of   happiness. The results indicated that overall globalization (model-1) and, economic globalization and social globalization (model -2) had statistically significant positive impact on happiness. It was concluded that in the overall globalization index, the share of economic and social globalizations is more effective to make individuals happy than that of political globalization. The governments of the selected Asian countries are recommended that they should focus on creating an environment to increase social support and should extend efforts to accelerate social and economic globalization. Governments should spend on welfare projects to feel people happy via bringing down inflation and unemployment rates and discouraging conspicuous private consumption.