Public Assistance, Economic Prospect, and Happiness in Urban China

This article investigates the association between urban China’s primary public assistance program—the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (MLG, or Dibao)—and recipients’ subjective well-being using the national China Household Income Project 2002 data. We use a propensity score matching method to address selection bias and a mediation modeling approach to explore the associational pathways between Dibao participation, economic prospect, and happiness. We find that Dibao recipients tended to be less optimistic about their economic prospect and less happy than their non-recipient peers of similar socio-demographic characteristics. The possible influence of Dibao participation on happiness was mediated by the projected lack of income increase in the next 5 years, but not by their views on societal income distribution and inequality. These findings call for future reforms of the urban Dibao to improve not only the economic conditions but also the subjective well-being of China’s urban poor.