Happiness and Life Satisfaction in Central Asia

This book offers the first comprehensive examination of life satisfaction and happiness in Central Asia from an empirical and comparative perspective. Drawing on econometric models, it reveals how economic conditions, gender, culture, and social norms shape subjective well-being in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The findings provide insights into the complex structure of quality of life in a region that has received little attention in happiness research. As such, the book makes a pioneering contribution to the study of well-being in Central Asia and serves as a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and researchers interested in happiness-oriented development and the determinants of well-being worldwide.

Shoirakhon Nurdinova is a Professor at the Tashkent University of Applied Sciences in Uzbekistan. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Anadolu University in Turkey. Her primary research area is happiness economics, with a specific focus on gender and migration in Central Asia. Nurdinova has published the first academic papers on happiness economics in Uzbek and authored the first textbook on behavioral economics in the Uzbek language. She has conducted research on the well-being of housewives at the Erasmus Happiness Economics Research Organization under the supervision of Professor Ruut Veenhoven. As a visiting scholar at Indiana University, she studied life satisfaction among Uzbek women migrants in Turkey. She was a fellow with the George Washington University-Nazarbayev University (NU-CAP), where she analyzed internal and external migration in Central Asia. Alongside her academic work, she has over 15 years of experience as a consultant for international organizations, including the Aga Khan Foundation, USAID, UNDP, the European Training Foundation, and the International Organization for Migration.