Seminar in the Division for Advancement of Research

Mr. Karma Galay is a Chief Research Officer at the Centre for Bhutan Studies. Prior to the current position, he worked as a Planning Officer at the Macroeconomics Division of the the Ministry of Planning. He has a BA Hons. in Economics from Sherubste College, Bhutan and an MA in International Policy Studies from Stanford University, CA, USA.

Time is an important resource for everyone. It is also a limited resource in that we have only 24 hours in a day to put to competing uses. Therefore, how we use this limited resource becomes important and has implications to our economic and social wellbeing. More specifically, researches have shown that there is a direct link between what one does (use of time) and the happiness or subjective wellbeing that s/he experiences. Taking this and other utilities that time use studies provide in the studies of alternative development paradigm or indicators as the basis (or the lecturer’s theoretical context), the seminar explores to establish empirical relationship between patterns of time use and the level of happiness among a sample of Bhutanese population. The researcher uses the data from the pilot survey on time use in Bhutan that was conducted as part of greater survey that collected information on Gross National Happiness. The work is still under progress but some initial findings suggest positive relationship between time use and the subjective wellbeing experienced by the respondents. For instance, there is a negative correlation between total hours of work and level of happiness (the more one devotes time to work taking it away from other aspects of life, lesser one feels happy).