Fearing Scarcity or Inequality: Urban Infrastructure Investment and Individual Subjective Wellbeing in China

By matching city-level infrastructure investment data with microlevel family panel survey data in China, this study integrates the perspectives of need satisfaction and social comparison to empirically investigate how the absolute and relative levels of urban infrastructure investment interactively impact individual subjective wellbeing (SWB). After controlling for related individual-, household-, and region-level factors, ordered probit regression results provide evidence that individual SWB in a city significantly relates to not only the absolute level of urban infrastructure investment but also its relative superiority compared to the investment in economically, administratively, and geographically proximate cities. By contrast, the relative equivalence in urban infrastructure investment compared to economically, administratively, and geographically proximate cities is illustrated to be less significantly associated with the SWB of residents, suggesting that the mechanism of social comparison primarily revolves around “being better than peers” rather than “being equal to peers.” The results further illustrate that absolute infrastructure investment negatively moderates the association between relative investment superiority and residents’ SWB, such that the positive marginal benefit of relative superiority declines as the level of absolute investment increases. SWB is simultaneously impacted by age, gender, marital status, household registration status, health status, social status, education level, and household income as well as city scale and population density. As an exploratory effort to empirically investigate the associations between macrolevel urban infrastructure investment and microlevel individual SWB, this study offers insights into how complex urban infrastructure development activities can be more systemically and equitably managed to promote human-centered and harmonious socioeconomic development.