The Impact Of Worship On Individual S Well Being

Purpose Individual well being has been the focus of analysis among rapidly rising number of economists in the world Especially after the ground breaking work of Layard 2005 a variety of factors affecting well being has been identified in the literature However despite its prime importance religion could not get the proper importance in such an analysis It has been observed by some critics that for example GDP ignores the environmental cost a country is bearing wealth variations between poor and rich factors impacting the well being of the individuals like mental health social relations and personal safety Anheier and Stares 2002 Fleurbaey 2009 Michaelson et al 2009 Subjective well being is the level of satisfaction from an individual s life environment relationships and other economic and social matters Researchers found a number of factors which affect well being and which are therefore included in the economic and environmental judgment There are also many non material factors which can affect well being presented in McAllister 2005 including personal relationships Helliwell and Putnam 2004 social and community relationships Keyes 1998 employment Layard 2005 and political regimes Donovan and Halpern 2003 contextual and situational factors demographic factors iv institutional factors Hoorn 2007 Some studies included religious factors as the determinant of well being Hewitt Source 1994 Chang 2003 There have been studies Iannaccone 1990 1998 and 2000 Finke and Stark 1992 Finke 2003 and Hamdani 2006 that brought the attention of other researchers towards multi disciplinary research The emerging importance to study religion has convinced the social scientists to observe how religion affects different aspects of human behaviour According to Iannnaccone 1998 more than 200 papers have been published on religious and the economic impact of religion Approach methodology design The paper examines weather religiosity per capita consumption and education index can affect well being Using data from the Divine Economic Survey 2000 the study is an application of Divine Economics Divine economics is a term associated with the study of economics and religion in each other s perspective Divine economic survey s 2000 data set on 302 household is used in this study In this survey prayer index is used which identifies number of obligatory prayers respondent performs daily The Divine Economic dataset was said to be the largest in the world on religion and economics Freeman London School of Economics 2004 1 Researchers such as G Sison et al used Ordered Logit Model as their dependent variable life satisfaction it is an index which takes values from 1 to 10 Our Well being index takes values from zero to 100 i e it is a sum of responses against a variety of questions To check the impact of religion we used OLS technique and descriptive analysis for the study Limitations Ideally we should have used the Divine Economic Survey 2009 conducted by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics However that data set cannot be used due to copyrights Therefore we have used Divine Economics Survey 2000 for our study A future researcher can obtain access to the later dataset Findings The study found that negatively per capita consumption and worship education index and duty time positively effect on individual s well being 1 Unpublished official comments on Divine Economics Survey 2000