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The Impact of Social Capital on Subjective Well-Being: A Regional Perspective

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Abstract

This study analyses the determinants of the most widely used indicators of subjective well-being (SWB), namely life satisfaction and happiness, within European regions. In particular, we assess to what extent these two measures are related to strictly economic factors or alternatively are driven by social and institutional settings. Our analyses extend the corresponding literature by (1) focusing on European regions instead of nations of the whole world and thus allowing for intra-national differences; (2) highlighting the impact of social capital considered in a broad manner covering general trust, institutional trust, associational activity and the close social ties; and (3) modelling possible spatial influences from the neighbouring regions by estimating a spatial error model. The results indicate that such spatial autocorrelations indeed exist and that the various social capital components are major impact factors alongside the conventional determinants health, religion and unemployment, but that income does not exhibit a statistically significant influence on the SWB of the European regions considered.

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Notes

  1. Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) is the regional classification used by Eurostat.

  2. Countries in the sample (number of regions in brackets): Austria (9), Belgium (11), Bulgaria (6), Switzerland (1), Czech Republic (8), Germany (13), Denmark (5), Estonia (1), Spain (6), Finland (4), France (8), Greece (3), Hungary (7), Ireland (2), Italy (4), Lithuania (1), Luxembourg (1), Latvia (1), Netherlands (12), Norway (1), Poland (16), Portugal (5), Romania (8), Sweden (8), Slovenia (2), Slovakia (4), United Kingdom (12).

  3. Both SWB indicators are ordinal-scaled and as such the arithmetic mean could be an inappropriate aggregation method. Therefore, the analyses were repeated using the regional percentages of people defining themselves as quite or very happy or as highly satisfied (scoring between 8 and 10 on the question of life satisfaction). The results of these additional analyses (not shown here) are similar in algebraic sign and significance of the estimated coefficients and hence do not provide further information.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Innsbruck, Universitaetsstr. 15, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria

    Sibylle Puntscher, Christoph Hauser & Gottfried Tappeiner

  2. Department of Statistics, University of Innsbruck, Universitaetsstr. 15, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria

    Janette Walde

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  1. Sibylle Puntscher
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  4. Gottfried Tappeiner
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Correspondence to Sibylle Puntscher.

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Puntscher, S., Hauser, C., Walde, J. et al. The Impact of Social Capital on Subjective Well-Being: A Regional Perspective. J Happiness Stud 16, 1231–1246 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-014-9555-y

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