How's Life in Your Region? Measuring Regional Material Living Conditions, Quality of Life and Subjective Well-Being in O
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How’s Life in Your Region? Measuring Regional Material Living Conditions, Quality of Life and Subjective Well‑Being in OECD Countries Using a Robust, Conditional Benefit‑of‑the‑Doubt Model Eni Dardha1 · Nicky Rogge1 Accepted: 9 June 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper measures and analyses well-being in the 349 regions in OECD countries. It is argued that the multidimensional nature of well-being and the disparate policy priorities of nations/regions calls for a reconciliatory performance evaluation framework, for which this paper advocates the use of Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) weighting. In particular, using the BoD-model, three multidimensional measures of regional well-being are computed: a material condition measure, a quality of life index and a subjective life satisfaction measure. To account for the presence of certain exogenous conditions in the regional policy environments, the conditional robust order-m version of the BoD-model is applied. Results show considerable between- and within-country disparity in regional performances across the three domains of well-being. Countries such as Australia, Canada, Norway and Iceland show consistently high levels of regional well-being. Consistently low performance levels are observed for Chile, Turkey and Poland. Keywords Data envelopment analysis · Benefit-of-the-doubt model · Composite indicator · Regional well-being · Conditional order-m BoD · OECD
1 Introduction The definition of well-being and the measures used to evaluate the social performance in societies have been subject of an ongoing debate for several decades. Since well-being is a multidimensional concept, it cannot be assessed directly. Many factors that contribute to people’s well-being do not have a price tag, thus the broadly used economic production (e.g. gross domestic product) do not fully measure societal well-being; for this reason, it is
* Nicky Rogge [email protected] Eni Dardha [email protected] 1
Faculty of Economics and Business, Onderzoeksgroep Economie (ECON), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KULeuven), Warmoesberg 26, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
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important to consider several variables that recognise people’s quality of life. For instance, people in societies nowadays value the environmental conditions and the personal security of where they live and work. Many organisations have undertaken initiatives in this direction. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with the Measuring the Progress of Societies Initiative and, later in 2011, the OECD Better Life Initiative goes beyond the focus on the GDP and extends to people’s well-being and societal progress. These initiatives aim at generating statistics that capture aspects of life that are of crucial importance to societies, which in turn help with the development and policy-making of countries. The OECD Regional Well-being is an extension of the OECD Better Life Initiative, which measures well-being on a more granular level, tha
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