While a growing literature within the study of subjective well-being demonstrates the impact of socio-political factors on subjective well-being, scholars have conspicuously failed to consider the role of the size and scope of government as determinants of well-being. Where such studies exist, the focus is largely on the advanced industrial democracies of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development. In this study, we examine the size of the public sector as a determinant of cross-national variation in life satisfaction across a worldwide sample. Our findings strongly suggest that as the public sector grows, subjective well-being increases as well, conditional on the extent of quality of government. Using cross-sectional data on 84 countries, we show this relationship has an independent and separable impact from other economic and political factors.

虽然越来越多的主观幸福感研究文献表明社会政治因素对主观幸福感的影响，但学者们显然没有将政府的规模和范围作为幸福感的决定因素考虑在内。在存在此类研究的地方，重点主要是经济合作与发展组织的先进工业民主国家。在这项研究中，我们将公共部门的规模作为全球样本中生活满意度的跨国差异的决定因素进行了研究。我们的研究结果强烈表明，随着公共部门的发展，主观幸福感也会增加，这取决于政府的质量程度。使用 84 个国家的横截面数据，