The Impact Of Expenditure For Agriculture,forestry And Water Conservancy On Rural Residents' Happiness

The ultimate aim of various government policies and fiscal institutions is to improve the level of residents' happiness.Today,the unbalanced development of urban areas and rural areas is a serious problem existing in China.In addition,more and more social contradictions in the countryside become burning problems and have to be resolved urgently.Therefore,government gradually expands investment scale to settle problems related to agriculture and farmers in the countryside,which are named ‘three rural issues'.Accordingly,the fund is mainly used in developing agriculture industry,forestry industry,water conservancy and improving living standard of residents in order to raise residents' happiness.And as the part of fiscal expenditure,the term of this expenditure is ‘Expenditure for Agriculture,Forestry and Water Conservancy'(AFW Expenditure).Thus,this thesis makes a research on the relationship between AFW expenditure and rural residents' happiness so as to find out whether higher AFW expenditure yiels higher level of level of residents' happiness and examine the policy effects.Paper starts with reviewing a large number of literatures and anaylsing the concept,measurement methods and determinants of happiness.In addition,paper focuses on the literatures about relationship between happiness and public expenditure scale or public expenditure structure.To summarise,most research uses provincial macro data or prefectural macro data to match individual data during positive analysis process,leading to a lower accuracy.Additionally,there is only few literatures about studying relationship between AFW expenditure and the happiness of residents in rural area systematically.All things considered,this paper firstly analyses the mechanism of the impact of AFW expenditure on rural residents' happiness and clarifies the concept and measurement method of happiness discussed in this paper.Then,using the data of Chinese General Social Survey with macro data at the county level,the paper makes a positive analysis on the impact of AFW expenditure on rural residents' happiness.Consequently,according to several regression results,there are three main conclusions.First,increasing per-capita AFW expenditure doesn't have an impact on the happiness of residents who have rural or urban household registration.At the same time,raising per-capita AFW expenditure is able to improve the happiness of residents who live in rural areas significantly above the demographic and economic determinants normally taken into account.As for residents who have rural or urban household registration live in urban areas are probably affated by the negative effects of policiesSecond,as far as the group of residents who live in rural areas and have rural household registration,the effect of AFW expenditure on happiness will be affected by their health.As for the group of residents who live in rural areas but have urban household registration,both relative social status and income make their happiness rise with AFW expenditure.Third,in terms of the group who live in rural areas,the shortage of fresh water plays an important role in the relationship between their happines and AFW expenditure.In addition,the indirect effect that is caused by fresh water problem accounts for about 5% of the total effect.In particular,this paper has two innovations.On the one hand,using county-level macro data to match individual data is able to improve the accuracy of results.On the other hand,research discusses the subject systematically from two perspectives,taking interaction and intermediate factors into account as well.