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Based on the data from “Thousand village surveys” project of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, we employ the ordered logistic method to do the empirical analysis on consumption, life and satisfaction (subjective well-being) of Chinese rural elderly. First, the result shows that the consumption (exclude medical expenses) has positive effect on the satisfaction of Chinese rural elderly, while the rural elderly are not preferred to compare with others. Good participation in social life and medical care condition could enhance the satisfaction of rural elderly. Second, the authors divided the sample into two groups as high-consumption group and low-consumption group. The result shows that the low-consumption group more tend to rely on their family members than high-consumption group. The authors suggest that in order to improve the rural elderly life satisfaction, the government needs to improve medical care system.

Aiming to investigate the direct and indirect effects of community involvement on residents’ life satisfaction, this study builds a conceptual framework through the mediation effect of perceived impacts and trust in government based on social exchange theory. The moderating effect of place attachment among these variables is proposed and empirically examined.

The conceptual model and causal relationships were estimated by adopting structural equation modeling, a serial mediation and moderation analysis. A total of 362 valid questionnaire data from residents in five rural tourism communities of China were collected and used for data analysis.

The results indicate that residents’ community involvement directly influences their life satisfaction and indirectly through perceived benefits and trust in government. Place attachment is also found to moderate the effect of community involvement on residents’ life satisfaction.

This study tests the effect of community involvement on residents’ life satisfaction that evolves from linking community involvement to perceived tourism impacts and trust in government to increase life satisfaction within the rural tourism context. It simultaneously detects place attachment as a moderating variable. The findings of this study can provide valuable insights for rural tourism managers to improve residents’ life satisfaction.

为了探究社区参与对居民生活满意度的直接和间接影响, 本研究基于社会交换理论构建了通过感知影响和政府信任作为中介效应的理论模型。同时, 提出并实证检验了地方依恋在这些变量关系中的调节作用。

采用结构方程模型和一系列的中介和调节分析来估计概念模型和变量之间的因果关系。从中国五个乡村旅游社区收集了362份有效问卷并进行数据分析。

结果显示, 居民的社区参与不仅直接影响他们的生活满意度, 并且通过感知收益和政府信任对他们的生活满意度产生间接影响。研究还发现,地方依恋可以调节社区参与对居民生活满意度的影响关系。

本研究探讨了乡村旅游可持续发展中社区参与对生活满意度的影响, 这种影响从链接社区参与与旅游感知效应到政府信任, 从而提高生活满意度,同时检验了地方依恋的调节作用。本研究能够为乡村旅游管理者提高居民生活满意度提供有价值的建议。

Con el objetivo de investigar los efectos directos e indirectos de la participación de la comunidad en la satisfacción con la vida de los residentes, este estudio construye un marco conceptual a través del efecto mediador de los impactos percibidos y la confianza en el gobierno basado en la teoría del intercambio social. Se propone y examina empíricamente el efecto moderador del apego local entre estas variables.

La relación causal entre el modelo conceptual y la estructura se estima a través del modelo de ecuación estructural, y se lleva a cabo una serie de análisis de mediación y regulación. Los datos fueron recolectados de 362 cuestionarios válidos de cinco comunidades de turismo rural en China.

Los resultados muestran que la participación comunitaria de los residentes influye directamente en su satisfacción con la vida, e indirectamente a través de sus ingresos percibidos y la confianza en el Gobierno. El estudio también encontró que el apego local puede regular la participación de la comunidad en la satisfacción de los residentes con la vida.

Este estudio explora el impacto de la participación comunitaria en la satisfacción con la vida en el desarrollo sostenible del turismo rural, que va desde la vinculación de la participación comunitaria y la percepción turística hasta la confianza del Gobierno, mejorando así la satisfacción con la vida. Al mismo tiempo, se examina la función reguladora del apego local. Los resultados de este estudio proporcionan información de referencia valiosa para que los administradores del turismo rural mejoren la satisfacción de los residentes con la vida.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the non-monetary effect of credit access by providing an econometric framework which controls the problem of selection bias.

The study is conducted in Assam, India and uses a quasi-experiment design to gather primary data. The ordered probit model is used to evaluate the non-monetary impact of credit access. The paper uses a propensity score approach to check the robustness of the ordered probit model.

The study confirms the positive association of credit access to life satisfaction of borrowers. It is found that, in general, rural borrower’s life satisfaction is influenced by the ability and capacity to work, the value of physical assets of the borrowers as well as some other lenders’ and borrowers’ specific factors. But, the direction of causality of the factors influencing borrowers’ life satisfaction is remarkably different across credit sources.

The study argues to provide productive investment opportunities to semiformal and informal borrowers while improving their life satisfaction score. Although the results are adjusted for selection and survivorship biases, it is impossible with the available data to assess which non-income factors explain the findings, and therefore this limitation is left to future research.

The study contributes to the literature of rural credit by assessing the probable differences among formal, semiformal and informal credit sources with respect to non-monetary impacts.

Political connections are widely acknowledged as an effective political strategy for achieving firm value. However, surprisingly little is known about the association between political connections and individual-level outcomes (e.g. subjective well-being) and the underlying mechanism for this link.

Drawing on the schematic model of social capital and entrepreneurship and utilizing a sample of rural Chinese entrepreneurs, the authors developed and tested a multilevel model delineating the impact of political connections on entrepreneur well-being (job and life satisfaction) via the mediating roles of bribing behavior and institutional trust at individual and provincial levels.

Multilevel analyses revealed that at the individual level, political connections were positively associated with job and life satisfaction; bribing behavior and institutional trust served as partial mediators of these associations. These effects were deviated when examining them at the provincial level.

The theoretical implications concerning the political connections and subjective well-being effects as well as comparative entrepreneurship were discussed.

Further, the authors provide guidance for both entrepreneurs and policymakers.

The study linked political connections to entrepreneurs' subjective well-being which is increasingly seen as an important ingredient of personal success via distinguishing the individual-level effects from the provincial-level effects. Thus, the study further contributes to the contextualized understanding of the entrepreneurship literature.

With the rising of “religious fever” in China rural area, the authors inquire the reason why it happened. First, the authors explore the group characteristics which could affect both happiness and the religion belief of Chinese rural elderly. The authors analyze the micro-data of “thousand village surveys” data of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics by using Order Logit and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method. These results show that when the elderly people have the following features related to health such as: feeling psychological loneliness, not obtaining the good management of chronic disease in the village, and not being participated in new rural cooperative medical system are more likely to believe in religious in the rural areas. And the authors also find these Chinese rural elderlies who believe in religion are less happy than atheism elderly actually (by PSM). Believing in religion is not the solution and maybe the way these elderly resorts to when they encounter health problem.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of the perceived performance of the government on subjective well-being based on the individual-level survey data of Kazakhstan. Having implemented substantial economic and public administration reforms over nearly three decades since independence in 1991 Kazakhstan presents an interesting case to explore how people perceive the outcomes of the reforms.

This paper estimates the relationship between life satisfaction and its determinants with the ordered logit model making use of the ranking information in the response variable.

This paper establishes that satisfaction with public service delivery, living conditions and personal and economic factors that are subject to public policy, along with trust in government institutions contribute to life satisfaction. The more satisfied individuals are with the quality, affordability and accessibility of public services, the more satisfied they are with their lives as a whole. A higher level of trust in government institutions increases individual well-being.

There is still a lack of research on subjective well-being in the less developed world. This study will help reveal important determinants of subjective well-being in the context of a developing country. Also, this study is valuable in terms of examining the impact of citizen satisfaction with public service delivery on subjective wellbeing based on rich individual-level data of the national quality of life (QoL) survey.

In this chapter, rephrasing Spivak's question into ‘can subaltern children speak?’, I reorient the research on China's gigantic population of children and youths in rural migrant families towards a critical interpretative approach. Based on life history and longitudinal ethnographic interview gathered with three cases, I unpack the multiple meanings migrants' children attach to mobility in their childhood experiences. First, despite emotional difficulties, children see their parents' out-migration more as a ‘mobility imperative’ than their abandonment of parental responsibilities, which should be contextualized in China's long-term urban-biased social policies and the resultant development gaps in rural and urban societies. Second, the seemingly ‘unstable’ and ‘flexible’ mobility patterns observed in migrant families should be understood in relation to a long-term family social mobility strategy to promote children's educational achievement and future attainment. The combination of absent class politics in an illiberal society with an enduring ideology of education-based meritocracy in Confucianism makes this strategy a culturally legitimate channel of social struggle for recognition and respect for the subaltern. Last, children in migrant families are active contributors to their families' everyday organization amidst mobilities through sharing care and household responsibilities, and developing temporal and mobility strategies to keep alive intergenerational exchanges and family togetherness. The study uncovers coexisting resilience and vulnerabilities of migrants' children in their ‘doing class’ in contemporary China. It also contributes insights into our understanding of the diversity of childhoods in Asian societies at the intersection of familyhood, class dynamics and cultural politics.

Low‐income transitional countries in the region of the Caucasus and Central Asia lack the existence of a solid assessment of public perceptions regarding the causes of poverty during transition. The purpose of this paper is to fill that gap in the existing literature.

This paper uses the secondary analysis of a recent cross‐sectional multinational survey to shed light on public beliefs of the causes of poverty in seven countries of the region – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In addition, Russia and Ukraine are used as a comparison point. The theoretical framework for this study is that the subjective beliefs regarding the explanations of poverty can be classified into three broad groups: individualistic, fatalistic, and structural. Hence, regression coefficients and marginal effects of the multinomial logit regression model (MNLM) are estimated to associate the set of various individual, households, and community characteristics selected in the conceptual framework with the likelihood of choosing one of the three afore‐mentioned explanations of poverty.

The results of cross‐tabulation reveal that in a majority of the countries studied, the predominant explanation for poverty is structural, with the exception of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where predominant explanations are, respectively, fatalistic and individualistic. The results of MNLM show that most individual, household, and community characteristics possess the expected direction and are in line with previous findings. However, some of the characteristics have a similar significant effect across several countries, while other characteristics are significant for a single country only.

These findings demonstrate that despite the dominant post‐socialist ideology which favors individualistic and fatalistic explanations of poverty based on the economic rationality of market capitalism, the efforts of the elites in promoting and imposing these ideologies has not been fully successful. Nevertheless, no single unified model of the determinants of beliefs regarding the causes of poverty in the countries of the region is observed.

This is one of the very few papers aimed at assessing public perceptions regarding the causes of poverty in transitional countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia.