Socioeconomic Happiness Inequalities in Canada (2012)

Abstract

In recent years more attention has been paid to happiness, that is, the satisfaction to life. Economists are interested in analyzing how the average and dispersion of happiness change across the socioeconomic line, thus find out which levels of socioeconomic characteristics have the lowest happiness inequality. By doing this, a social planner could intervene to affect socioeconomic characterisitcs to alleviate happiness inequality and improve the overall happiness in a society. In this paper, we present a methodology for evaluating happiness average and inequality based on Canadian residence across 11 regions (i.e) the 10 provinces and 1 territory aggregation) and analysis of the relationship between happiness average and inequality and different levels of a consistent set of socioeconomic characterisitcs. The data is from Canadian Community Health Survey of 2012 and seems to find that high average level of happiness is consistent with high level of socioeconomic factors. However, there is no clear dominate pattern exists in socioeconomic happiness inequality.