An Economic Exploration On Optimal City Size Under The Happiness Dimension

Happiness is the everlasting pursuit of human unremitting efforts. It is of great significance to take the concept of "happiness" into economic research, and regard it as an important reference index, the development direction or constraint factor.However, in recent years, the massive urbanization process hasn’t helped to accelerate the improvement of residents’ happiness, nor has it paid any due attention to residents’ satisfaction and well-being. Therefore, with the use of literature research, qualitative analysis and empirical analysis, this thesis will examine the optimal city size under the happiness dimension, which mainly includes the following parts:First of all, since the number of documents directly related to this topic is extremely limited, this essay expands its scope to review, respectively, a wider range of existing articles that are related to two themes-subjective well-being and optimal city size. On the basis of literature review, this paper defines the meaning and influencing factors of happiness, the measurement and criteria for the classification of city size, and also exploratively adds a series of intermediate factors to construct the impact mechanism model of city size on its residents’ happiness.Secondly, the paper uses the2011cross-sectional data both from a survey and the Statistical Yearbook to quantitatively study the relationship between residents’ happiness and city size, as well as their relationship on the introduction of a series of intermediate variables. The results show that there is no direct linear relationship or inverted U-shaped relationship between city size and residents’ happiness, but the five intermediate variables of average income, government expenditure, book share, educational opportunities and traffic conditions can help to establish the inverted U-shaped relationship between city size and residents’ subjective well-being correspondingly. With these results, the paper calculates the optimal city size under the dimension of happiness.Finally, basing on the summarization of the whole paper, reflect the urbanization process in China. According to the empirical results, the thesis proposes three policy recommendations:moderately control city size in principle of the maximization of residents’ happiness; focus on different personalities of cities and seek for opportunities to improve residents’subjective well-being; intensively use resources as the bottom line to build "green" cities of happiness. At the same time, analyze the innovation and the inadequacies of this essay; some future research directions with high value and feasibility have also been described and discussed.