Estimating Worldwide Life Satisfaction
ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 65 (2008) 35– 47 available at www.sciencedirect.com www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon METHODS Estimating worldwide life satisfaction Saamah Abdallah⁎, Sam Thompson, Nic Marks nef (the new economics foundation) ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Whilst studies of life satisfaction are becoming more common-place, their global coverage is Received 1 August 2007 far from complete. This paper develops a new database of life satisfaction scores for 178 Received in revised form countries, bringing together subjective well-being data from four surveys and using 5 November 2007 stepwise regression to estimate scores for nations where no subjective data are available. Accepted 12 November 2007 In doing so, we explore various factors that predict between-nation variation in subjective life satisfaction, building on Vemuri and Costanza's (Vemuri, A.W., & Costanza, R., 2006. The Keywords: role of human, social, built, and natural capital in explaining life satisfaction at the country Life satisfaction level: toward a National Well-Being Index (NWI). Ecological Economics, 58:119–133.) four Quality of life capitals model. The main regression model explains 76% of variation in existing subjective scores; importantly, this includes poorer nations that had proven problematic in Vemuri and Costanza's (Vemuri, A.W., & Costanza, R., 2006. The role of human, social, built, and natural capital in explaining life satisfaction at the country level: toward a National Well- Being Index (NWI). Ecological Economics, 58:119–133.) study. Natural, human and socio- political capitals are all found to be strong predictors of life satisfaction. Built capital, operationalised as GDP, did not enter our regression model, being overshadowed by the human capital and socio-political capital factors that it inter-correlates with.
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