Indians Want Higher Incomes; Westerners go for Quality of Life

In India, making money constitutes life’s happynomics, writes Tina Edwin quoting an online OECD survey

An Indian shopkeeper poses for a picture as he counts notes at his shop. (Photo: Reuters)

Money, they say, can’t buy you happiness. Or, as Beatles said, love. But having enough money does give people a sense of well-being in India and to a lesser extent in China and Russia, among the bigger economies of the world.

That’s what an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) web-based survey to determine which among 11 factors gave people a greater sense of well-being concludes. The survey, first launched four years ago, is used to build the Better Life Index for OECD countries. India is not part of the OECD but many from India took the poll.

The latest findings were published a few days ago.

What gives people a feeling of well-being depends on which part of the world they live, the level of economic advancement of the nation and individual prosperity. Overall, for most people around the world being satisfied with life and enjoying good health were top determinants of their well-being.

Aspirations Matter

But in India, where incomes are a fraction of those earned in developed countries, financial security is not a given but aspirations to live a good life is high, good health is a less significant dimension of well-being. It was ranked fifth among the 11 factors by 884 people from India who participated in the online survey. Level of education and skills as well as personal safety too were secondary to income, though they rank among the top five factors.

To be fair to those who participated in the survey from India, life satisfaction was marked as the most important driver of well-being in the OECD survey. Income and wealth was at the second position. Life satisfaction is a measure of how people evaluate their life as a whole rather than their current feelings, the OECD explains.

Compare Indian responses with those from other emerging nations that are at different stages of development such as China, Brazil and Mexico, where per capita incomes are much higher, and see how the results vary with greater affluence. Good health is among the two most significant factors contributing to feeling a sense of well-being. This is similar to the responses of people in rich European nations and the US, where incomes are high and there is social security to fall back in their hours of crisis. It is also a reflection of how people’s priorities change when they reach a certain income level. Significantly, across most of Europe, the US, Japan and Australia, income does not figure among the top contributors to well-being.

Quality of Life is Important

Not just good health, as people get wealthier with economic advancement of their nations, there is greater consciousness about their quality of life – measured not by tangibles such as ownership of assets but by intangibles such as quality of air they breathe and clean and safe water. And so, for people in Europe and the US, where rapid industrialisation through the 19th and 20th centuries led to a rise in pollution and green house gases which were later significantly cleaned up, it is clean environment that contributes immensely to their feeling of well-being.

They also want more time to spend on themselves and with their families, for leisure activities and to enjoy some of the wealth they create. So, enter work-life balance. Even the workaholic Japanese treasure work-life balance. But, it does not figure among the top five contributions to well-being in India, China or Russia. The Australians are the fiercest about maintaining a work-life balance, which therefore emerges as the top contributor to well-being in the country-continent. No wonder then, many professional emigrants from the West seeking a balanced life choose to live in Australia, notwithstanding its distance from the rest of the civilisation.

The factors identified by OECD as contributing to a feeling of well-being are jobs and earnings, housing conditions, social connections, civic engagement and governance, and subjective well-being besides life satisfaction, income and wealth, health status, education and skills, work-life balance, personal safety and environment quality. These 11 factors are used because “well-being is a multidimensional concept that deserves a multidimensional measure”.