GCOE Discussion Paper Series
Global COE Program

Human Behavior and Socioeconomic Dynamics
Discussion Paper No.212

Envy and Hope: Relevant Others’ Consumption andSubjective Well-being in Urban India

Xavier Fontaine and Katsunori Yamada

August 2011

GCOE Secretariat
Graduate School of Economics

OSAKA UNIVERSITY

1-7 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka, 560-0043, Japan

Envy and Hope: Relevant Others’ Consumption andSubjective Well-being in Urban India ∗Xavier Fontaine†

Katsunori Yamada ‡August 25, 2011

Abstract
This paper exploits a unique micro-level survey to investigate the relationshipbetween subjective well-being and reference consumption in urban Indian. Using
accurate computations of individuals’ reference consumption, we find that other’s
consumption has a positive impact on subjective well-being. This result validates
Hirschman’s view that information dominates envy in rapidly developing areas.
Whereas envy seems to undermine the well-being impact of growth in economicallyestablished countries, growth appears to have an important role in urban Indian.
Our finding is robust to the way we define the reference level of consumption.

keywords: Subjective Well-being, India, Relative utility, Tunnel effects
JEL classification: D00, J28∗

We are grateful to Shinsuke Ikeda, Fumio Ohtake, and Yoshiro Tsutsui for permission for the usageof an unique data set of “Survey on Preferences toward, and Satisfaction with, Life" of Osaka University.
We are also grateful to the CEPREMAP for providing us the Indian National Sample Survey data. We
would like to thank Claudia Senik, Andrew Clark, Clément Imbert and the seminar participants at Paris
School of Economics for their helpful comments. Any remaining errors are the sole responsibility of theauthors.
†
Corresponding author: Paris School of Economics. E-mail: fontaine@pse.ens.fr‡
Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University. E-mail: kyamada@iser.osaka-u.ac.jp1

1

Introduction

An important amount of research has recently been devoted to enrich the relative
consumption theory. The view that behaviour and well-being levels can be affectedby the relative position individuals derive from their consumption levels appears
indeed to be very challenging from an economist perspective. Therefore, a variety of
approaches have been taken to explore this relative consumption hypothesis, ranging
from empirical and experimental evaluations of its validity, to theoretical to empiricalinquiries into the causes and consequences of such a phenomenon (see Clark et al.
(2008) for a review).
Despite this rich corpus, twilight zones remain to be explored in this nascentfield of research. While the literature abounds with investigations in economicallydeveloped countries, the role comparisons play in emerging economies and (less advanced) developing countries is still insufficiently documented. This is especiallytrue for India and China, whereas these two countries account respectively for 17 %and 19 % of the world population.
The present study aims at bridging this gap, providing evidences on the importance of relative concerns in one of the biggest emerging country: India. This is doneby using an original survey on subjective well-being and expenditure in urban India.
When other studies on developing countries may have to cope with limited datasets,
we follow Clark and Oswald (1996) and Luttmer (2005) by combining our data withan external, huge and representative survey on consumption and expenditure in India. This allows us to compute accurate estimates of the prevailing expenditure levelin the reference groups.
The main finding in this paper is in line with Hirschman’s conjecture aboutcountries experiencing a rapid economic development (Hirschman and Rothschild(1973)). Namely, we find that, in urban India, one is better off when people aroundher consume more than she does. This finding confirms that ambition may dominate
envy in rapidly growing areas, and brings some new lights to our understanding of
the well-being impact of growth.
This paper is organized as follows. The next section provides a brief literature
review and motivates our research. Section 3 presents our data set and empirical
specification. Empirical results are shown in Section 4, and Section 5 concludes thepaper.

2

Literature Review

2.1

Envy and ambition

The evidences accumulated during the last two decades gave birth to the generalconsensus that one’s well-being depend on how much people consume arround him.
However, seeing people consuming more than me can either have a negative, or apositive impact. This depends on the relative strength of two underlying and opposed
forces. The first one is envy: the higher the consumption level of people around me,
the worse I feel. This theory has been introduced in the economic framework by
Duesenberry (1949).
The second force goes the other way round, correlating positively others’ consumption and own well-being. The idea is that, in some contexts, an individual

2

may consider others’ consumption as a valuable information about his future levelof consumption. In situations where the economic mobility is high, but where there
is also a lot of uncertainty about future outcomes, seeing people like me becomingricher gives me an information about the probability that I’ll also become richer
later. Anticipating this improvement in my living conditions makes me feel better
today.
This informational effect of others’ consumption has been conceptualised byHirschman (1973). It is often referred to as the tunnel effect, due to Hirschman’s
metaphor where a driver, stuck in a traffic jam in a two-lanes tunnel, feels better
when seeing cars beginning to move again in the other lane. Even if everybody isstill stuck in the same lane as our driver, he is pleased because he thinks that his
turn will come soon.

2.2

Overall impact of other’s consumption

Which of envy and information/ambition dominates the other is highly contextdependent. The informational value of others’ consumption is expected to be higher
in countries whose economic structures change rapidly, and that are characterised byimportant opportunities and strong uncertainty. In these countries, information may
be expected to outweigh envy. In economically established countries, the contrary
can be expected.
In line with these presumptions, most of the studies on developed countries reportthat the consumption level in the reference group impacts subjective well-being
negatively, irrespective of the way one define the reference group. A rich review ofthis literature can be found in Clark et al. (2008). Very recently, Card et al. (2010)
exploited a natural experiment setting to disentangle the respective roles of envy
and information among Californian working in universities. Consistently with thepreviously quoted literature, they found that envy outweigh information, so that theoverall impact of other’s income is negative.
When turning to Eastern-European, formerly communist countries, the picturechanges radically. The collapse of the communist bloc lead to dramatic changes insocial institutions and market structures, creating a lot of opportunities, but also
a lot of uncertainty. In this context, one can expect the informational effect tobe prevailing. The evidences support this guess: in her 2004 paper, Senik used a
Russian panel survey to show that subjective well-being is positively correlated toothers’ income during the 1994-2000 period.
She extends her study to other post-transition countries, including Hungary,
Baltic countries, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania (Senik (2008)). Again,
she finds the same kind of relationship, strengthening the support of Hirschman’s
conjecture in transition countries.
The "less developed countries" form a very heterogeneous group, with respect
to social mobility and uncertainty. For this reason, no overall conjecture can bemade about the relative strengths of envy and ambition. Despite the rareness ofthe data in these countries, some authors managed gauge the importance of relative
concerns in some of them, revealing mostly that envy is also of importance in theless developed countries (see Clark and Senik (2011) for a review).
Notwithstanding the variety of situations in these countries, some quite homogeneous subgroups can be elicited. India and China form one of them, with annual

3average growth rates of respectively 7.4 % and 10.4 % over the last decade, and populations of 1.2 and 1.3 billions. In both countries, growth carries a lot of opportunities,
especially in urban areas. In Indian, growth has been shown to be sustainable — tothe sense of Arrow et al. (2003) — for five other decades (Sato et al. (2011)). For
these reasons, one could expect the prevalence of a strong Hirschman effect in thesetwo countries. Also, we can expect the informational effect to be stronger in urban
areas.
So far, the lack of subjective well-being data hindered the research on comparisonin India and China. To the best of our knowledge, only two papers make use of
survey data to assess the role of group consumption in these countries, and bothof them concentrate on rural areas. While Linssen et al. (2011) found that envy isdominating, Knight et al.’s study (2009) revealed both envy and ambition, dependingon the specification. In this context, further investigations in India are welcome,
especially in rapidly growing urban areas.

3

Model and Data

3.1

Model specification

As usual in the literature (Clark et al. (2008)), we model welfare as a function of
log-expenditure, and of the log-reference level of expenditure. To be more precise,we specify the welfare function U as:(1)

Ui = α + ln(expi )βexp + ln(ref expi )βref exp + Xi γ + εi

exp being monthly household expenditure per capita, while ref exp is the median ofhousehold expenditure per capita in the reference group. The Xs are other importantsocio-economic characteristics: age, sex, caste, marital status, number of children,
labor force status, education, city.
The choice of the median instead of the average is motivated by one of its property, which is to be less sensitive to outliers (this point has been made by Clark et al.
(2009)). As a matter of fact, replacing the median by the average in estimations does
not substantively change the magnitude of β̂ref exp , but increases its standard-error
as can be expected.
Because well-being statement are a discrete measure of the underlying and unobservable welfare level U , our estimations are based on an ordered logit specification.
However, and as often the case (Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters (2004)), assumingthat well-being statements are cardinal instead of ordinal (i.e. using ordinary leastsquares instead of an ordered probit) does not change the results substantively.

3.2

Defining the reference group"People like me" are usually defined as those individuals who share some importantcharacteristics with the respondent (social proximity), and who live or work close to
her/him (geographical proximity). In most empirical studies, social and geographicalproximities are used jointly to define the reference group, even though some papers
consider only the former (e.g van de Stadt et al. (1985)) or the latter (e.g. Luttmer(2005)).

4

Here, both dimensions have been taken into account. More precisely, the reference groups have been defined accordingly to four criteria. The first three of them
are those used by Ferrer-i-Carbonell (2005): education, age and geographical location. Because India is endowed with a strong social hierarchy, caste has been added
to this list. Alternative specifications are tested in section 4.3.
Education is defined accordingly to seven categories: illiterate ; literate but noformal schooling ; primary ; middle/upper primary; secondary/higher secondary ;college, but not graduate ; graduate and above. The age distribution has been
divided into three groups, each one containing one-third of the adult populationof the cities we study: 18-28 ; 29-40 ; 41 and above. The six cities are: Delhi ;Mumbai ; Bengaluru ; Chennai ; Kolkata ; Hyderabad. Finally, the three castes
are the Scheduled Castes ; the Other Backward Classes ; and the "Other" (that is,
those that belongs neither to Scheduled Castes or Tribes, nor to an Other Backward
Class). 1 Altogether, these categories produce 378 cells.
Studying the impact of reference consumption implies the inclusion of a set ofdummies for each characteristic we use to define the reference group. The average
expenditure level prevailing in a city may well be correlated to the level of public
services, for instance ; this level of public services is very likely to be positively correlated with well-being. Not including these dummies could lead to serious endogeneity
problems.

3.3

Data description

The present study uses two datasets jointly. The first one, the Osaka database (hereafter ODB), surveyed about 1800 people in India in 2008, asking them subjective
well-being and household expenditure questions, among others. 2 The second one is
the Indian National Sample Survey (NSS), a huge representative survey driven by
the Indian government. The NSS surveyed about 570,000 Indians in 2007-08. We
used the NSS to compute in each reference group the median household expenditure
per capita.
The Osaka database ("Survey on Preferences toward, and Satisfaction with,
Life") is a longitudinal survey, conducted by the University of Osaka. Three waves
of Indian data have been collected: 2008, 2009 and 2010. The first wave covered
1 800 adults in six big cities, drawing respondents randomly (with quotas) in eachcity. the two following waves surveyed the same individuals.
Obviously, using the ODB to estimate the reference levels of expenditures would
be nonsense, due to the limited sample size. For this reason, we use an external
representative, sizeable and good quality dataset to compute these reference levels.
The National Sample Survey, started by the Indian government, in 1950, is an old
institution, cumulating 64 rounds. It uses elaborated sampling methods to cover
the whole Indian territory. In the six cities the ODB surveyed, the National Sample
Survey covered 18 700 people (13 400 adults) in 2007-2008.
1

The Scheduled Tribes represent at most 2% of the population in the cities we have at hand. As aconsequence, they are not considered in the present study.
2
Using the same data set, Ito et al. (2011) investigated the determinants of individual preferences forincome redistribution in India. They showed that relatively wealthy individuals are more likely to favor
greater redistribution. Their focus was on altruistic preferences and re-distribution policy in India, andwas not related to relative utility issues which is the main focus of this paper.

5

At the time we are writing, we cannot use the last waves of the NSS. Thus, weare not able use the longitudinal dimension of the ODB, as it would require at least
one more year of NSS data. For this reason, we only take benefit of the first year of
the ODB. Exploiting the panel dimension of the ODB is left to further versions of
this paper.
As said previously, there are 378 reference groups. In the NSS, there are on
average 37 individuals in each of these cells. This number increases to 77 if we
consider only the cells to which at least one respondent from the ODB belongs (i.e.
the cells used in the regressions). This allows us to compute quite accurate estimatesof the reference levels of expenditure in each group.

4

A strong tunnel effect

4.1

Impact of reference group expenditures

Table 1 provides the results for two specifications. The first one omits the reference
level of expenditure, while the second includes it.
Ui = α + ln(expi )βexp+Xi γ + εi (I)Ui = α + ln(expi )βexp + ln(ref expi )βref exp +Xi γ + εi (II)In specification (I), the level of expenditure has a positive and strongly significant (to a 1 % level) impact on subjective well-being. This effect stays the same
when adding the reference level of expenditure. The impact of the reference level of
expenditure is also positive, and significant to a 2.5 % level. β̂ref exp appears to bebigger than β̂exp , even though their ratio does not statistically differ from 1.
This result strongly supports the presumption that there exist a tunnel effect inthe emerging India, and that this tunnel effect rules out envy. This informational
effect of others’ consumption appears to be as strong as the impact of own consumption. This actually means that an individual benefits twice more from an increase in
its consumption when people like him increase their consumption in the same proportion. This result contrasts sharply with what is usually found in most developed
countries, where an homogeneous increase in the level of consumption prevailing ina group often results in an absence of well-being improvement.

4.2

Other covariates

Most of the other covariates (the number of children, marital status, age, and gender)
are found to have significant impact on subjective well-being in both regression (I)and regressions (II). Several specifications have been tested for both the number ofchildren and the age categories, without leading to a substantial significance increase.
Some educational and caste dummies have a significant impact in the first regression,
but not in the second.
Individuals are happier when they are student than when they belong to any otherlabour force category. A fallaciously astonishing result is that jobless people don’t
seem to be worse off than workers. This is explained by the fact that, accordingly
to the NSS, the jobless category mostly consists of housewives and househusbands.
City dummies have a strongly significant impact, irrespective of the regression
considered. Interestingly, the associated coefficients fit very well to the knowledge6we have about each of these cities. Graph 1 shows the relationship between city
coefficients on one hand, and both crime rate and water supply on the other hand.
The correlation between city coefficients (from regression II) and crime rates is -0.41.
The correlation between city coefficients and the level of water supply is 0.46. 3

Figure 1: Relationship between the city-specific coefficients in SWB equations, and city
observable characteristics

-0.5
-1.5

100

200

300

400

500

80

Crime Rate

4.3

-1.0

City Coefficient

-0.5
-1.0
-1.5

City Coefficient

0.0

Water Supply

0.0

Crime Rate

100

120

140

160

180

Water supply

Robustness checks

The trustworthiness of our main result is checked along several lines. First, we address the concern that the positivity of the relationship between happiness andthe reference level of expenditure may not be robust to the way the referencegroup is specified. To do so, we test all the possible combinations of the education/age/city/caste variables to define the reference group (education-age-city,
education-age-caste, education-age, . . . ), and check whether we find some negativeand significant coefficient. The impact of the reference level of expenditures appears
to be positive and 10% - significant in one case (education-city-caste, with β̂exp = .54
and β̂ref exp = .66), and insignificant in all the other cases. 4
The logarithmic specification of the relationship between (own and referencegroup) expenditures and well-being can also be questioned. For that reason, we also
check if our results are consistent when using a second-order polynomial specification
instead of a logarithmic one, to allow for concave, convex and linear shapes. Again,
we find concave, positive and significant impacts for own and others’ expenditures.
3

The crime rate data are those made available by the Ministry of Home Affairs (National Crime
Records Bureau (2008)). Water supply is measured in litters per day per capita. Two reports, using thesame methodology, have been combined to get water supply data for all the cities we have at hand: one
from the Indian Ministry of Urban Development (2010), and the other one from the Asian Development
Bank (2007).
4
When defining the reference group accordingly to only one variable, we have to drop the dummies
related to the reference group in order to avoid colinearity problems. In that case, we have to cluster
accordingly to the reference group variable. The results are unsingnificant. Remark that, in our case,this type of regressions does not make much sense, since the reference level of expenditure takes at most
6 values when the reference group is defined accordingly to a single variable.

7Another important robustness check is achieved by using individuals’ statements about how much others earn around them. The Osaka survey includes the following question: "About how much household income is common for people aroundyou?". This question follows directly an annual household income question. We
estimates the two following equations:
Uit = αi + ln(incit )βinc+Xit γ + εit (III)Uit = αi + ln(incit )βinc + ln(ref incit )βinc exp +Xit γ + εit (IV)where inci stands for the annual household income level, and ref inci is the answer
to the above question. Remark that, this time, we have added a time-dimension,and introduced individual fixed-effects. The ODB is indeed a panel survey (2 waves
available so far). Unfortunately, and as already said, the 2009-2010 wave of the NSS
is not available at the time this first draft is written, preventing us from running apanel analysis for equation (I) and (II). The next version of this paper will extend
our results in this direction.
We estimate (III) and (IV) using fixed-effect OLS. The results are summarised intable 2. The log(reference income) coefficient is positive, with a t-stat of 1.94 (10%significance level, almost 5%). It’s very likely that the 5% significance level will beattained when we will introduce the third wave of the ODB in our panel analysis(i.e. in the next version of the present paper).

5

Conclusion

The well-being impact of economic growth is obviously a topic of utmost importancefor economists. Concentrating on six rapidly growing cities in India, this paper aims
at bringing some additional material into the reflexion. Using subjective well-being
data, together with several measures of the reference level of expenditure, we findthat the richer people "like me" or "around me", the happier I am. To put it
differently, envy does not undermine the well-being benefits that people can derivefrom growth, or at least not as much as it does in economically well-establishedcountries. Seeing other people becoming richer them appears to be a very valuable
information in India. As a consequence, individuals indeed better off when theyknow their living conditions are going to improve.
One should not conclude from our results that positional motives — such as
envy — are not driving consumption behaviours in India. People’s consumption is
an important signal for me, but this does not mean that I won’t try to keep up
with them. What can be learned from the present study is rather that envy has a
noticeably lower impact than information in urban India.
The present analysis could be deepened using panel data methods, but this hasn’t
be done so far for data availability reasons. Fortunately, we will be able to takebenefit from additional waves of data for both the Osaka database and the National
Sample Survey very soon. Using them jointly will allow for a deeper exploitation of
the panel dimension of our data.

References
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9National Crime Records Bureau (2008): “Crime in India 2008,” Tech. rep.,
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10Table 1: Happiness regression: estimations without, and with objectively measured reference group expenditures. Ordered probit.

log( HH expenditures)
capitaref. group log-medianWorking (omitted)
Jobless
RetiredStudent
nchild: 1-3
nchild: 4+Single without parents (omitted)
Single with parents
Married without p.
Mar. with p.
InformalOtherage: 18-28 (omitted)
age: 29-40
age: 41+
Male (omitted)
FemaleIlliterate (omitted)
Litterate
Primary
Mid/up prim.
high secnd.
CollegeGraduate+
Delhi (omitted)
MumbaiBengaluru
Chennai
KolkataHyderabad
Non-low caste (omitted)
Other backward caste
Scheduled caste
Num. Obs.
log-likelihood
pseudo-R-squaredIb
0.561***

se
0.143

II
b
0.527***
0.680**

se
0.145
0.278

0.218
0.232
0.890**
0.069
0.066

0.229
0.259
0.390
0.264
0.330

0.228
0.222
0.904**
0.083
0.104

0.231
0.259
0.396
0.265
0.331

-0.346-0.133
0.257
0.744
0.213

0.467
0.233
0.269
0.734
0.387

-0.471-0.136
0.207
0.662
0.215

0.466
0.233
0.269
0.738
0.389

-0.194-0.196

0.236
0.236

-0.153-0.350

0.235
0.247

0.056

0.218

0.072

0.221

0.321
0.125
0.401
0.728**
0.869**
1.013***

0.655
0.359
0.248
0.253
0.339
0.291

0.348
0.013
0.273
0.396
0.549
0.401

0.647
0.363
0.254
0.291
0.397
0.392

-0.987***-1.532***-0.976***-0.582**-1.229***

0.245
0.304
0.263
0.215
0.227

-1.079***-1.720***-1.135***-0.497**-1.352***

0.248
0.322
0.275
0.218
0.234

-0.370** 0.184
0.045
0.206
812
-1543.36
0.0438* p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.001
Standard errors in parenthesis

11-0.097
0.218
0.406
0.249
807
-1532.51
0.0455

Table 2: Happiness regression: estimations without, and with subjective measures ofreference income. OLS with fixed-effects.

log(Household income)log(Reference income)Num. Obs.
R-squarred (Within)

III
b
se
0.292** (0.100)
2212-0.0411IVb
se
0.346* (0.135)
0.223 (0.115)
1816
0.0937* p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.001
Standard errors in parenthesis

12