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Height, Weight and Well-Being for Rural, Urban and Migrant Workers in China

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Abstract

In general, the happiness literature has paid little attention to the relationship between physical appearance and well-being. In this paper, we examine the link between weight, height and well-being for three distinct samples in China given that attractiveness effects likely vary greatly across sociocultural contexts. As China has recently undergone rapid economic transformation in the urban areas, this empirical exercise is particularly interesting because it can highlight how changing social norms have affected the relationship between physical appearance and subjective well-being. For the rural and migrant samples, we find that for both men and women, big and tall individuals have higher levels of well-being. This is consistent with the notion that the strong are better off when more labor intensive work is the norm. For the urban sample and for urban males in particular, no well-being penalty is found for being obese, unlike previous results based on Western samples. It is very likely that the unique Chinese cultural practice of network building banquets and feasting is behind this finding.

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Notes

  1. Set point theory predicts that well-being tends to fluctuate around a stable level over time (Cummins 1998; Fujita and Diener 2005). In response to positive events, an individual’s well-being might rise transiently but then will revert to this stable level or set point. Likewise, after experiencing negative events, an individual’s well-being might decline but will eventually return to the set point.

  2. Euromonitor International—“Beauty and Personal Care in China”, May 2014.

  3. This is roughly equivalent to the population size of Singapore and about twice the size of its labor force. One can perhaps better appreciate the magnitude of the problem when one imagines this to be an annual issue, where a fresh cohort of graduates is looking to replace twice the size of the entire workforce in Singapore.

  4. See, for example, the article in the 23 May 2013 issue of the Atlantic Magazine “Why Chinese College Graduates Aren’t Getting Jobs.” It highlights a case where one journalism student “made it through the resume selection process and the written exams to the last rounds of interviews, but was eliminated during the physical examination.”

  5. Migrants are typically clustered in dormitories near factories and construction sites, often without a registered address. For each city, a sample of migrant workers was randomly selected within each workplace, based on their birth month.

  6. We also experimented with using the GHQ scoring method (0–0–1–1) as an alternative and found similar results. The Likert scoring method will produce a wider and smoother score distribution (Goldberg et al. 1997) and is useful in conducting our semi-parametric estimation in the next section.

  7. We also estimated the models presented in Tables 2, 3 and 4 excluding health as anthropometric measurements are likely to be related to health. This allows us to estimate a total effect of height or BMI on SWB. In general, for the regressions involving SWB and height, the results are quite similar but the coefficients on height are marginally larger when health is excluded from the model. A similar pattern can be seen in the regressions involving SWB and BMI, although for urban females, the coefficient on BMI loses its significance and is smaller in magnitude.

  8. In essence, guanxi can be defined as being about building a network of mutually beneficial relationships.

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Acknowledgments

Zhong Zhao acknowledges financial support from the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71173227). The collection of the Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) data used in this paper is financed by IZA, ARC/AusAid, the Ford Foundation, and the Ministry of Labor and Social Security of China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia

    Wang-Sheng Lee

  2. School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China, 59# Zhongguancun Street, Beijing, 100872, China

    Zhong Zhao

  3. IZA, Bonn, Germany

    Wang-Sheng Lee & Zhong Zhao

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  1. Wang-Sheng Lee
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Correspondence to Wang-Sheng Lee.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 5 and Fig. 4.

Table 5 Results for SWB, Height and BMI
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Fig. 4
figure 4

BMI and household income for the urban sample. Notes: The model estimated includes the covariates listed in Table 1 and provincial dummies

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Lee, WS., Zhao, Z. Height, Weight and Well-Being for Rural, Urban and Migrant Workers in China. Soc Indic Res 132, 117–136 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1143-y

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