Looking beyond wealth: the Philippine national happiness index as a complement for traditional income measures
Date
2009-03-31
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Abstract
This study tests the validity of claims that pervade the study of economics today-happiness scores of people in any given country do not have any straightforward relationship with increasing economic growth. Philippine happiness data is used to correlate with various economic indicators in order to ascertain the pitfalls of using traditional aggregate growth measures in assessing the overall quality of living of the Filipino people. We empirically establish that in the Philippines, happiness has a strong cross-sectional correlation with income yet such a relationship is not observable across time.
Then, we posit ways of constructing a new index for measuring "gross national happiness" while touching on issues regarding the viability of such a measure to complement, or even replace the GDP as a means of measuring the population's overall well-being. We propound the Human Development Index (HDI) as the model after which the Philippine National Happiness Index (PNHI) can be patterned. Coefficients generated from the regression analysis are used to determine the weights of specified dimensions in order to take into account the happiness of the population while minimizing the arbitrariness of the original HDI computation.
Lastly, we touch on the issues concerned with government policies attempting to maximize national happiness or well-being instead of traditionally quantifiable growth measures.
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Keywords
Quality of life, Well-being metrics, Happiness index, Income measures, Wealth, Investment, Portfolio investment