Whose Happiness in Which Cities? A Quantile Approach

Philip S Morrison

doi:10.3390/su132011290

Abstract

The proposition that living in the largest urban agglomerations of an advanced economy reduces the average wellbeing of residents is known as the urban wellbeing paradox. Empirical tests using subjective wellbeing have produced mixed results and there are two reasons for being cautious. Firstly, the default reliance on the conditional mean can disguise uneven effects across the wellbeing distribution. Secondly, relying on respondents to define their settlement size does not ensure a consistent measure of the agglomeration. I therefore apply quantile regression to the life satisfaction and happiness measures of wellbeing as collected by the 2018 European Social Survey (ESS9) and employ a consistent local labour market-based definition of agglomeration—The Functional Urban Area (FUA). I compare three countries as proof of concept: one with a known strong negative (respondent defined) agglomeration effect (Austria), one with a slight negative effect (Czech Republic), and one where living in the main agglomeration is positively associated with average wellbeing (Slovenia). The uneven wellbeing effect of living in the largest agglomeration in each country raises questions about who benefits in which cities.

Highlights

The proposition that living in the largest urban agglomerations of an advanced economy reduces the average wellbeing of residents is known as the urban wellbeing paradox
One such thesis is that average wellbeing rises with urban residence in developing countries but falls with residence in the largest urban agglomerations of developed economies, a phenomenon known as the urban wellbeing paradox
Urbanisation remains a primary instrument in the quest for economic growth and on those grounds alone one would expect residence in successively larger and richer urban clusters to be associated with higher levels of subjective wellbeing

Summary

Introduction

The proposition that living in the largest urban agglomerations of an advanced economy reduces the average wellbeing of residents is known as the urban wellbeing paradox. I compare three countries as proof of concept: one with a known strong negative (respondent defined) agglomeration effect (Austria), one with a slight negative effect (Czech Republic), and one where living in the main agglomeration is positively associated with average wellbeing (Slovenia). The uneven wellbeing effect of living in the largest agglomeration in each country raises questions about who benefits in which cities. One such thesis is that average wellbeing rises with urban residence in developing countries but falls with residence in the largest urban agglomerations of developed economies, a phenomenon known as the urban wellbeing paradox. The first asks whether those living within the largest urban centres of developed countries in Europe do return lower average levels of wellbeing—hypothesis 1 (H1). The first is to offer partial support for H1 by showing that the majority of the nearly thirty countries covered by the European Social

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