The Influence Of Social Trust On Chinese Residents' Life Satisfaction

Since the reform and opening-up, the flourish of socialism market makes the level of dwellers' material life improve a lot. Life satisfaction has attarcted more and more attention across the world. However Chinese people's level of life satisfaction once fell sharply since there has been a systematic investigation.About study on residents' life satisfaction, most of the existing literature analysis from the perspective of the residents' income level, the gap between rich and poor, social demography such as gender, age, education and other micro perspectives. With the macro economic factors as starting points,there are a few literature study its impact on residents' life satisfaction, such as economic growth rate, unemployment, inflation, etc. There is almost no research related to the effect of social environment on residents' life satisfaction. With the rapid development of economy, distrust between people is deepening. Social trust is one of the most important factors affecting the individual life satisfaction.Based on the micro-data concerning China of the World Value Survey and the macro-data in China Statistical Yearbook, using the estimation method named Ordered Logit, this paper verifies the relationship between trust and life satisfaction in China, and tests its robustness. The result shows that trust have significant positive effect on individual life satisfaction. This paper shows that those who trust most other people have a high probability of reporting being satisfied with life and a low probability of reporting being not satisfied with life comparied with those who think most other people cannot be trusted. The conclusion holds true to 1995, 2001 and 2007 sub-samples, to the rest areas except the East, and to low and middle-income groups. As a result, construction of social trust is an important way to improve residents' life satisfaction.We should take effective measures to govern the credibility crisis and rebuild social trust. This is an effective way to improve people's life satisfaction in China.