创业活动影响幸福感吗——基于国家文化与制度环境的比较研究

Do Entrepreneurial Activities Affect Happiness? A Comparative Study on National Culture and Institutional Environment

创业活动真的能够提高民众幸福感吗?本文将国家文化与制度环境两方面的背景结合研究创业活动与幸福感之间的关系,提出不同的文化背景会引导不同类型的创业活动,对国民幸福感产生不同影响,而制度环境则会与它产生联合作用。基于全球创业观察(Global Entrepreneurship Monitor)、盖洛普世界民意调查(Gallup World Poll)、全球领导力与组织行为有效性(Global Leadership and Organizational Behavioral Effectiveness)和世界银行四大国际数据库2012-2016年的非平衡面板数据实证结果表明,在传统主义文化主导的国家,创业活跃度(TEA)与幸福感存在显著的倒U型关系,而在现代主义文化主导的国家,创业活跃度(TEA)与幸福感存在显著的正相关关系。进一步的研究发现,制度环境在两种情况下对创业活跃度与幸福感之间的关系都存在增强作用。本文研究结果凸显了基于文化背景的创业类型研究的必要性,也暗示在市场化改革同时引导文化观念的转变才有可能在大众创业背景下实现"万众创新"。

Entrepreneurship, as one of the approaches for anticipating social and economic activities, has great significance to accelerate economic growth and ease employment tension. With the popularization of entrepreneurial activities, research on the impact of entrepreneurship on happiness has been attracting more attention in economics and social psychology. Current research mainly focuses on ＂Promotion Theory＂ represented by welfare economics and ＂Positive and Negative Utility Theory＂ represented by social psychology. From the perspective of promotion theory, entrepreneurial activities not only create more employment chances and lower unemployment rate, but also improve national income and promote the national happiness. At the same time, entrepreneurial activities, as a new self-employment approach, can maximize production efficiency and enhance participants＇ personal achievement orientation and self-motivation, and their happiness also increased when compared with traditional employment. From the perspective of positive and negative utility theory, there is a nonlinear inverted u-shaped relationship between entrepreneurial activities and happiness. To some extent, entrepreneurial activities can improve the national income and social welfare and decrease unemployment rate, which in turn increase national happiness. However, with the continuous improvement in entrepreneurial activities, the widening gap of per capital income and the aggravation of social inequality will actually reduce national happiness.Current research about entrepreneurial activities and happiness mainly has two disadvantages. First of all, it is difficult to acquire large sample data at the national level. Existing empirical research mainly focus on individual micro-level and a small number of transnational comparative studies are limited to sample data from several developed countries. These comparative studies at the individual level or national level do not take into account the impact of cultural values and institutional differences. Furthermore, the existing research mostly adopted cross-sectional data and will lead to the deviation of the research conclusion, for entrepreneurial activity＇s impact on happiness is gradually accumulated and the relationship between them should be a dynamic process. As a consequence, panel data is more appropriate for tracking research.In this study, we investigate the relationship between entrepreneurship and happiness by combining national culture and institutional environment respects. We argue that different cultural background leads to different types of entrepreneurship activities, affecting the citizens＇ happiness in different ways. And the institutional environment also has a collateral effect on this. Based on unbalanced panel data from 2012 to 2016 which are drawn from GEM, GWP,GLOBE World Bank datasets, our analyses conclude that an inverted U-shaped curve relationship exists between entrepreneurship and happiness in traditional culture country, while entrepreneurship positively correlates with happiness in the modern culture country. Moreover, we find that institutional environment positively moderates the above relationship. The results demonstrate the necessity to study entrepreneurship types from a cultural background perspective and emphasizes that more innovation will occur if we pay attention to the transformation of citizens＇ cultural views while deepening the market liberalization reform.