Population Aging And Happiness

The 21 st century is the century of population aging, all countries in the world will face a serious problem about population aging. A lot of research and practice at home and abroad show that, population aging has various significant influence on social and economic development. However, most researchers pay more attention to the economic growth effect caused by population aging and countermeasures of it, while neglecting the impact of population aging on residents' happiness. Happiness or utility is the life goal of a person, and the ultimate goal of a government. Thus, it's worth our further study to know that what kind of influence population aging will have on happiness and what the influence mechanism is.Happiness research has been very mature in many countries, especially developed countries. Since the 1970 s, the studies of happiness gradually get into the specialized agencies. At present, the authority on happiness research is the World Values Survey(WVS). The WVS and the European values survey(EVS) do a survey about residents' values in cooperation, for more than 100 countries and regions of the world(nearly 90% of the world's population). The survey has a total of five waves, spanning more than 20 years. The WVS 5th wave survey has investigated 57 countries and regions which conclude 82,992 questionnaires about people's happiness during 2005—2008. This paper uses 64,269 samples of 51 countries to analyze the influence of population aging on happiness. We also calculate the marginal effect of population ageing effect on happiness.The results show that rapid population aging has significantly decreased happiness, the effect weakens with the increase of per capita GDP in all countries, but reinforces with rise in age and going up in income ladder in lower-income countries, while reinforces with rise in age in high-income countries. The policy implication is that economic growth is the main countermeasure against population aging, which explains the rationality of countries around the world making efforts to develop economy from one aspect and provides an alternative explanation for Easterlin Paradox.