Happiness in Eastern Europe



This paper studies a group of countries from Eastern Europe that consists of those that either
will join the European Union in May 2004 or hope to do so in the near future. Our core
question is to understand whether the situation of economic and political transition affects the
impact of those variables on life satisfaction that have been found to be important for Western
countries. The present data set contains representative population surveys (about 1000
respondents from 18 years of age onwards per country) collected by the Paul- Lazarsfeld-
Society in Vienna (see Rose et al. 1998) in 1991.2 This timing allows us to capture these
societies right at the beginning of the transformation process. Since we aggregate these
national data into a pooled cross-section, we are able to derive results for the group of Eastern
European countries as a whole as well as regarding the differences with respect to average
happiness levels.

2. Comparing average happiness

The dependent variable in our analysis is based on the answers to the following question:
On the whole, are you very satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied
with the life you lead?

1. Not at all satisfied, 2. Not very satisfied, 3. Very satisfied.

Answers are coded in three categories (no answers are coded as missing), which requires the
use of an ordered logit model. We use life satisfaction and happiness as synonyms, as
empirically, they seem to measure a very similar concept (Blanchflower and Oswald 2000).
Important summary statistics for all variables used in the present study are given in Table 1.
The last column presents Pearson’s correlation coefficients of the socio-demographic
variables with happiness. Relatively high positive correlations are found for married persons,
highest-income earners, non-church goers, and Catholics, while strongly negative associations
exist for divorced persons, those with only primary education, the unemployed, lowest-
income earners, and Orthodox. We should be very careful when interpreting these
associations. For example, the share of Orthodox is very high in certain countries, and it is not
clear whether religion causes these variations across countries or whether it is just a reflection
of these. The average of life satisfaction is 2.14, which is close to the median and mode
(omitted here), indicating that most respondents place themselves in the middle category.

2 Access to the raw data is restricted to primary and secondary researchers organised in the „Citizens in
Transition Network“. Detailed information on the survey project, including questionnaires, is available at the
Centre for the Study of Public Policy (CSPP) homepage:
www.cspp.strath.ac.uk The data for the Czech and
Slovak Republics are based on a split of the sample for Czechoslovakia, and thus contain a smaller number of
cases.



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