Dr. Chou Publishes Article

We are happy to announce that Dr. Chou’s article entitled: “Confidence as an Economic Indicator: A Cultural Ecology Perspective” is to be published by the Brussels Economic Review. Congratulations to Dr. Chou. A description of the article is found below:

In previous research endeavors on national economic development, almost no studies exist on how regional confidence can influence industrial and economic well-being. This paper provides a cultural-ecology parenthesis, which integrates climatic, geographic and genetic factors to spell out the forces of confidence on national economic well-being, which is reflected by the gross national income per capita. The correlation between the mean level of the Rosenberg self-esteem scale and the GNI per capita growth of 45 countries across the globe supports the hypothesis that the cultural-ecology perspective of confidence has a positive influence on overall economic development.

Among the economic competitiveness of a nation, cultural values are seen by some as being among the most decisive factors (Porter, 1990; Hofstede, 2001). Though the issue of culture is treated by Porter as a supplementary matter (O�Shaughnessy, 1996), he has explicitly argued the importance of a home base for sustaining and creating economic advantages (Porter, 1990). On the national economic level, cultural factors such as thrift and family values positively contribute to the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita growth across countries (Minkov and Blagoev, 2009). The gross national product (GNP) is also found to correlate negatively with emotional duration (Wallbott and Scherer, 1988), where low self-esteem contributes to delinquency (Baumeister et al., 2003). Confidence in this sense plays a rather motivating role in shaping a nation�s domestic and global policy sets, which can be utilized as factors for facilitating sustainable and long-term economic and industrial growth. Economic well-being in turn is also influenced by the confidence level of that country.

One way to measure economic and social well-being is to use some measures for examining economic wealth. Gross national income (GNI) per capita is defined as the sum of value added by all the residents of a nation, including: personal consumption expenditures, gross private investment, government consumption expenditures, net income from assets abroad and gross exports of goods and services. A country�s GNI per capita is a good indicator of its overall economic development (Bourguignon et al., 2004) and it is a trustworthy source for understanding the country�s economic strengths and needs, as well as the general living standard enjoyed by the average citizen.

Keywords: gross national income, confidence, cultural ecology, economic development, cross-cultural psychology