The link between health and happiness in South Africa: a gender comparison.

Abstract

Given the government's objective of increasing South Africans' quality of life (Camfield & Skevington, 2008; Street 2023), there is scope and clear motivation to establish the factors that contribute to well-being on a wider scale than the focus on income levels (Camfield & Skevington, 2008). It is important to analyse the relationship between health and life satisfaction not in isolation but as a part of a broader context of how it is impacted by other variables including the individuals’ context, reflected in measures of social capital, such as crime and theft in the neighbourhood. This enables us to have an in-depth understanding of health dynamics and how to improve the quality of life for South Africans, which will, in turn, contribute towards encompassing health sector policies. When economists draw out instructive models on how healthcare should be improved, life satisfaction is included as one of the variables affecting health. Therefore, paying attention to subjective well-being as one of the variables affecting health should take centre stage. The nationally representative panel data used in this study was taken from the five waves of the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS). Individuals’ self-rated health is the dependent variable, while happiness is reflected on a ten-scale of overall life satisfaction. Since the dependent variable health is ordinal in nature, the model used is the ordered logit model. This dissertation addresses the endogeneity problem caused by individual heterogeneity using a fixed effects model. Based on the results, the link between life satisfaction and health appears stronger for men. Looking at the relationship between social capital and health, it is expected that those who prefer to stay in the neighbourhood to report excellent health compared to those who prefer to leave the neighbourhood but in this case those who prefer to leave reported higher excellent health compared to those who prefer to stay for both men and women. The social capital variables were also used as the indirect channel, through which life satisfaction affects health. The results imply that life satisfaction works through religious practice to influence men’s health more than women’s. The link between life satisfaction and health is stronger for men, while social capital influences health outcomes differently by gender.