The Determinants of Subjective Well-Being in a Developing Country: The Ecuadorian Case
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The Determinants of Subjective Well‑Being in a Developing Country: The Ecuadorian Case Nicola Pontarollo1,2 · Mercy Orellana3 · Joselin Segovia3
© The Author(s) 2019
Abstract In this study, we identify some individual and contextual factors potentially affecting subjective well-being in developing countries and check their effect in the Ecuadorian case. Ecuador is an oil country where attempts have been made to overcome deep social and territorial inequalities by placing human well-being at the core of public policy through the National Plan for Good Living. By means of ordinary least squares and ordered logit with clustered standard errors, as well as multilevel ordered logit models, we find that oil-dependent territories negatively affect well-being. Moreover, women and indigenous people report lower well-being, while personal income, education, housing quality, institutional trust, health insurance and social relationships can improve it. From a policy perspective, we find that basic unmet needs still need to be fulfilled to increase well-being, and further improvements of the institutional framework, redistributive system and inclusion policies are required. In this respect, we observe that Good Living-based policy accurately addresses these elements and, therefore, has great potential for application in other countries with similar characteristics. Keywords Individual well-being · Ecuador · Individual characteristics · Contextual factors · Multilevel model
Nicola Pontarollo: The scientific output expressed does not imply a policy position of the European Commission. Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on behalf of the Commission is responsible for the use which might be made of this publication. The authors thank the Co-editors Stephanie Rossouw and Talita Dalton-Greyling for the helpful comments that significantly improved the paper. Further, thanks are extended to Diego Ontaneda for the helpful support with the graphical parts. * Nicola Pontarollo [email protected] Mercy Orellana [email protected] Joselin Segovia [email protected] 1
European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy
2
Department of Economics and Management, University of Brescia, Brescia, Italy
3
GIER, Universidad de Cuenca, Cuenca, Ecuador
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N. Pontarollo et al.
JEL Classification I30 · P16 · C30
1 Introduction In recent years, subjective well-being has provoked increasing interest from both social science researchers and governmental institutions. In developed countries, it is worth mentioning the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, the measure of “equitable and sustainable wellbeing” in the Italian State Balance in 2016, as well as policy initiatives related to wellbeing in the UK (Dolan et al. 2011), France (Tavernier et al. 2015) and Germany (Die Bundesregierumg 2017). Developing countries are also beginning to consider well-being formally, with Mexico, Brazil and Ecuador including it in their constitutions. In the latter, well-being
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