| dc.description.abstract | Taiwanese people have experienced relatively low long-run unemployment rate and inflation rate, comparing to other countries in the world; nevertheless, they are still unsatisfied with the macroeconomic circumstances. The fact indicates that traditional economic indicators cannot truly reflect how people feel. Fortunately, economists adopt happiness data from psychology literature, which has demonstrated that such data is a better measurement for people’s feeling. The thesis thus uses happiness data from World Value Survey to estimate the augmented Phillips curves for Europe, Asian Tigers, and Confucian-culture countries, to review the real effects of unemployment and inflation on people’s happiness and to calculate the marginal rates of substitution (MRSs) between the two rates. The empirical results reveal three main findings. First of all, unemployment doesn’t always hurt people more than inflation does. Specifically, inflation is more unfavorable in the oriental countries; yet, the occidental countries prefer unemployment more than inflation. The finding means that to achieve the best social welfare, the governments should modify their macroeconomic policies based on their people’s preferences on unemployment and inflation. Second, the estimated MRSs range widely from 0.37 to 3.7 across countries. According to the empirical results, we recalculate the Misery indexes for each country studied in this research, which indicate that the Misery index of Taiwan is larger than some countries experiencing higher long-term unemployment and/or inflation rates. Finally, anticipation of inflation also has influences on people’s happiness levels. It implies that governments should implement policies more carefully in the sense of altering people’s anticipation for inflation. | en_US |