Call for Papers on Enhancing the Subjective Well-Being of Rural Residents: Pathways, Impacts, and Policies

Subjective well-being encompasses the cognitive and emotional evaluations of people’s lives, reflecting positive and negative aspects of their psychological health. Positive subjective well-being outcomes, such as happiness, can contribute to collaborations between co-workers, promote employees’ curiosity, creativity, and innovation, and motivate people to succeed at work and persist in efforts to achieve their goals. Besides, workers with higher life satisfaction are more likely to be healthy and productive because healthier workers usually take fewer sick leaves. In comparison, the negative subjective well-being outcomes, such as stress and loneliness, arising from work and life activities can reduce work productivity, damage individuals’ physical health, and disrupt social harmony.

Despite the rich findings in the literature on subjective well-being, little has been focused on rural residents. While some research has investigated the impact of factors such as information and communication technology adoption, market participation, and poverty alleviation programs on farmers' subjective well-being, the existing studies in the field fall short of providing a whole picture of the drivers and barriers to enhancing rural residents’ subjective well-being. For example, other socioeconomic and individual factors, such as macroeconomic environment, government policies, agricultural production, employment, and health conditions, may also influence rural residents' subjective well-being. In addition, previous studies have predominantly focused on happiness and life satisfaction as positive subjective well-being outcomes and stress and loneliness as negative ones. It is worth emphasising that subjective well-being extends beyond these traditional outcome dimensions. For example, positive subjective well-being can also be captured through metrics such as confidence about the future, optimism, resilience, emotional stability, and social connectivity. Similarly, negative subjective well-being may include measures of feelings such as depression, anxiety, future-related worries, helplessness, low self-esteem, and hopelessness. Consequently, there is a pressing need to investigate the factors influencing rural residents' subjective well-being through these alternative and more comprehensive measures and the impacts of subjective well-being.

In this call for papers, we will collect high-quality qualitative and quantitative articles that develop new measurements for subjective well-being outcomes, investigate factors influencing subjective well-being, and assess how the subjective well-being of rural residents impacts socioeconomic outcomes and farm production.

Enhancing the subjective well-being of rural residents is vital for improving individual lives and crucial for achieving rural revitalization and fostering a harmonious society. Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all ages is also required to achieve the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (i.e. Goal 3). The findings from this special issue will deepen our understanding of the relationship between rural residents' subjective well-being and rural development. Additionally, they will offer policymakers actionable insights to design strategies, pathways, and targeted policy instruments to enhance rural populations' well-being and boost rural development sustainably.

Contributions related to (but not limited to) research investigating the following themes may be considered:

• New measurements or dimensions of (positive and negative) subjective well-being outcomes;
• Drivers, constraints, and interventions for enhancing the subjective well-being of rural residents (e.g. digital inclusion, financial inclusion, gender inequality, income gap, poverty incidence/reduction, basic living allowance program, medical insurance policy, education improvement, and living condition improvement)
• Subjective well-being issues of marginalized groups in rural areas (e.g. females, elderly, and children)
• Impacts of subjective well-being on social-economic outcomes (e.g. labor supply and labor market participation, income, consumption, income and consumption diversification, social and household medical burden, and physical health condition)
• Impacts of subjective well-being on farm performance (e.g. labour productivity, improved or sustainable agricultural practice/technology adoption, crop diversification, market participation, and agricultural profit)

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit manuscripts of 7,000-10,000 words, including references and footnotes but excluding figures and tables, via this link by August 30 2025.

The authors should also submit their manuscript in Word and title page to Prof. Wanglin Ma at [email protected]

All submissions must be original and not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Arrangements for Selected Papers

The corresponding authors of selected papers will be invited to deliver a 5-minute presentation at the virtual conference hosted by ADBI in November 2025. The corresponding authors are expected to review two manuscripts submitted by others.

After rigorous peer review, accepted papers will be included as chapters in an open-access book edited by the guest editors. The book is expected to be published in early 2026.

The corresponding author will be provided an honorarium upon approval of all deliverables.

The guest editors are Prof. Wanglin Ma, Lincoln University, New Zealand; Dr. Dil Rahut, Asian Development Bank Institute, Japan; Prof. Tetsushi Sonobe, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Japan.

Contact

All inquiries may be directed to Prof. Wanglin Ma ([email protected]) and Dr. Dil Rahut ([email protected]).

This Call for Papers can be downloaded here.