An Empirical Analysis Of The Quality Of Life Of Chinese Residents

In 1958, the American economist J·K·Calbraith put forth the concept of "The Quality of Life" for the first time in his work The Affluent Society, and since then researches on the Quality of Life have been made all over the western countries. From the 1970s on, quantitative analyses of the Quality of Life have been launched in western countries, and as a result a few systems of indicators have been set up. Studies in this area began in China in the 1980s, Chinese scholars in sociology did empirical researches on the Quality of Life in the realm of well-off indicators in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1995, the National Bureau of Statistics of China worked out a national quantitative standard of a Well-off Quality of Life, and this system of indicators was divided into five parts, including 16 indicators covering income, living environment, consumption structure, health and culture.In the present paper, the Quality of Life of Chinese residents is systematically studied.Part I gives a survey of research results concerning the Quality of Life, contributed by both Chinese and foreign scholars. The ideas of this paper are based on these results.Part II focuses on the construction of the indicators system of the Quality of Life of Chinese people, suitable to perform qualitative analysis. The concept of Quality of Life is an evolving one, so it is necessary to make the existing indicators systems complete. Missing of an important indicator would imply an inaccurate result.In part III, we perform empirical analyses of the Quality of Life of Chinese residents, using both time series data from 1997 to 2003 and section data of 31 provinces in 2003. We find out: (1) for each of the four involved aspects of the Quality of life—the material, the spiritual, the environmental and social—there are several indicators impacting significantly; (2) weights of the four aspects go upwards over time. Further data analyses reveal: (1) except for environment indices, the average of the other four indices declined in the sequence of the eastern, central and western regions; (2) the same four indices all vary apparently within the three areas, and variances of the indices in case of central and western areas are obviously less then in case of the eastern region.Analyses in these three parts lay solid foundations for part IV, where a series of countermeasures and suggestions are put forward in order to improve the Quality of Life of Chinese people. The four aspects of Quality of Life—the material, the spiritual, the environmental and social—form an indivisible integral that the Quality of Life of Chinese people can not be improved unless they are collectively promoted as a whole. Summarized: average income should be increased, people's cultural life enriched, various social factors harmonized, environment protected and pollution controlled, developments between different regions and developments among regions balanced.