The Economics of Wellbeing in China

Special Issue in Social Indicators Research

The Economics of Wellbeing in China

Guest editors:

Zhiming Cheng, The University of Wollongong, Australia
Vinod Mishra, Monash University, Australia
Ingrid Nielsen, Deakin University, Australia
Russell Smyth, Monash University, Australia
Ben Wang, Macquarie University, Australia

China is currently the second largest economy in the world. Many, relatively unique, socioeconomic and behavioural phenomena exist in China. Studying these phenomena will not only deepen our understanding of the Chinese economy and Chinese society, but will also provide new insights about how China, and her residents, are shaped by, adapt to, and transform social and economic forces. The different socioeconomic and institutional context of China vis-à-vis that of the West provides opportunities for evaluating, extending, and creating theories of wellbeing.

With this Special Issue we seek to expand our knowledge of wellbeing in China. Submissions should address the broad area of wellbeing through adopting a methodological approach grounded in economics or an allied discipline. Submissions that are interdisciplinary in that they draw on behavioural insights from economics and other disciplines or adopt approaches that inform economics using insights from other disciplines are particularly welcome.

We interpret economics broadly in this context to mean methodological approaches used in economics and allied disciplines and empirical approaches/methods typically employed by economists and researchers in allied disciplines. It would be ideal if we could pull together a group of papers in which traditional methods used in economics were informed by other disciplinary approaches or the papers showed how economics could improve methodological approaches in other areas. An example of the former might be how the use of multi-item indicators can provide insights over and above single item indicators of wellbeing, typically used by economists. An example of the latter might be how causation can be established with observational data on subjective wellbeing using instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, difference-in-difference or propensity score matching. These methods are commonly used in economics, but are relatively less used in some other social sciences. These issues could be illustrated using Chinese applications.

Submission deadline: 30 July 2015

For more information: http://www.isqols.org/category/blog/page/3/