Why Thais are less happy

2 September 2006

Dear friends,  

These days, I believe it  would be more desirable to define national development as something more than economic growth or GDP alone. That is, now it should include a consideration of people’s happiness – or what being now commonly called Gross National Happiness (GNH) – or some sort of reasonable definition of happiness.

For many years now I have been interested in developing a novel happiness index which is linked with broadbased macroeconomic variables as well as operationally feasible to observe and internationally possible to coordinate data collection framework; thus, as part of my research project , I decided to develop the first  happiness index for Thailand and hopefully can be used around the world for ranking purpose.    

I have developed verson one of such an index by analyzing the relationship between economic and social indicators – for example, economic growth,  inflation rate,  unemployment rate, etc. – and the happiness of the Thai population. Quantifying this relationship, I reasoned, would enable government and other national administrators to conveniently measure impact of various innovative policies on advancing people’s satisfaction and wellbeing.

I developed this happiness index based on an economic model and for convenience and cost effectiveness of obtain worldwide data for consistent comparison purpose, I slanted my model and index in such a way that I can  use information from the World Values Survey of more than 90 countries worldwide which is already in existence. Such surveys were already conducted four times by the International Network of Social Scientists. The detail of my mathematical model is not  a subject to dwell on here and belong to a more rigorous academic arena.

It is suffice to highlight just a few application of model outcome and say that my study found that current domestic political conflict and the sharp increase of oil prices have indeed reduced happiness levels of 1.3 million Thais or 2.1% of the Thai population who rated themselves as very happy during the first quarter of 2005, ranked themselves as less happy during the same period in 2006. While the number of Thais who ranked themselves as quite happy increased 1.2%, the number of Thais who chose the rating rarely happy or not happy increased 0.87%.

 Table 1: Distribution of the Thai population according to level of happiness (%) 

 My study also found that the variables influencing happiness can be classified into 2 groups: micro variables and macro variables. Micro variables include the factors gender, age, marital status, education level, employment, and level of income. My research results indicate that females are happier than males, the age of the least happiness (greatest unhappiness) is around 52 years old, cohabiting couples or married couples are happier than singles and the divorced, and people with higher incomes and more education were also happier.

Macro variants include economic growth, the unemployment rate, and the inflation rate. My results indicate that economic growth is positively correlated with happiness, while the inflation and unemployment rates are negatively correlated with happiness. Results also show that inflation has the biggest influence on happiness, the next most influential factors are the unemployment rate and the economic growth rate respectively.

This government has paid excessive and  virtually exclusive attention to economic growth or GDP. But such a narrow focus did not make people really happy. According to my research, I think it is high time for the government to cooperate with very key players , to solve the problems causing political crisis, and to review their goals for national development. All of us must focus on achieving the wishes most desired by our people. Our approach should be balanced. If we do this, we can see a nation of productive, proud people: happier Thais.

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