Study suggests strategies for achieving citizen well-being in different countries

Translation: Diana Taborda

There are different combinations of conditions that make it possible to achieve high subjective well-being (SWB), meaning that different countries might adopt different policies that lead to high subjective well-being. This is one of the conclusions of a study coordinated by the University of Coimbra (UC), which aimed to help understand how SWB varies across countries by analysing data from over 70 nations.

The subjective well-being perceived by each individual concerns "the subjective component of quality of life, which can be measured by the overall satisfaction with life, often referred to as happiness", explains the leader of the study, Maria da Conceição Pereira, Professor at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra (FEUC) and researcher at the Centre for Research in Economics and Management (CeBER).

The researchers assessed conditions such as national income, income distribution, the quality of institutions and several cultural dimensions (e.g. masculinity, individualism or power distance). The authors analysed data from 2019 (for 75 countries), 2015 (for 84 countries) and 2005 to 2007 (for 74 countries, using the three-year average) in countries from different regions of the world.

The research team used an innovative methodology in the field of happiness economics called fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to show that there are multiple conditions that act synergistically to achieve high or low subjective well-being. This method of analysis allowed for "a combinatorial approach that enables the empirical investigation of all possible combinations of conditions that act synergistically to achieve a certain outcome, rather than focusing on the individual effects of each condition, which is typical of correlational analyses," explains Conceição Pereira.

Besides emphasising that there is not just one path to achieve high subjective well-being, but several recipes, the study also shows that "none of the conditions considered in the analysis - high national income, income equality, high-quality institutions and the various cultural dimensions - are necessary for high subjective well-being," says Pereira. However, "high power distance and low individualism are necessary conditions for achieving low subjective well-being," she adds. These conditions are observed in countries like China and Russia.

In addition, the study shows that "the combinations of conditions that lead to low subjective well-being are not necessarily opposite to those that lead to high subjective well-being".

Commenting on the importance of this study, Maria da Conceição Pereira points out that "governments base their economic policy decisions on traditional indicators of economic performance, such as gross domestic product (GDP), considering it to be an indicator of the well-being of a country and its population". However, "the limitations of this indicator have been recognised for over four decades," she adds.

Furthermore, recent literature on the economics of happiness (a field of study that addresses the relationship between economic issues and people's individual satisfaction) "shows that what really matters to people's well-being goes far beyond what is reflected in an economic indicator such as GDP”.

Such studies have shown that the typical characteristics of countries with high subjective well-being are "high GDP per capita, high individualism, low power distance, low masculinity and low uncertainty avoidance, which suggests that there is a single recipe for promoting a nation's well-being," explains Maria da Conceição Pereira. However, in the specific case of this research, it was possible to show that "there are multiple paths or combinations that also lead to the subjective well-being of a country, meaning that there are nations that differ in the ingredients that make them (un)happy," the researcher notes.

Different countries can therefore implement different policies to achieve high levels of well-being. This conclusion has important implications for governments that include in their agendas other ways of measuring the subjective well-being indicators of their populations, in order to obtain a more holistic metric for evaluating economic policies.

The study also involved Filipe Coelho, Professor at FEUC and researcher at CeBER, and Graça Miranda Silva, Professor at the Lisbon School of Economics & Management, University of Lisbon.

The scientific article "Is there a happy culture? Multiple paths to national subjective well-being, published in the journal Kyklos, is available at https://doi.org/10.1111/kykl.12343.