Subjective Wellbeing in Rural and Urban Central Europe: Evidence from the European Social Survey (2008 and 2018)

Abstract Social surveys on wellbeing have been increasingly including measures of subjective wellbeing, alongside more often used objective ones, as they show the importance of a more comprehensive approach to understanding what constitutes good and happy lives. This paper relies on the European Social Survey (ESS) data from Round 4 (2008) and Round 9 (2018) to analyze and compare subjective wellbeing (SWB) in rural and urban areas of eight Central European countries: Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Based on available ESS items, we have constructed a more concise version of the VanderWeele et al.’s Flourishing Index, which we termed the Subjective Wellbeing Index (SWI), and which includes the following domains: (1) happiness and life satisfaction, (2) mental and physical health, and (3) financial and material stability. The main results indicate that all eight CE countries have relatively high and improving SWI scores, but stable relational position over the ten-year period. When looking at the rural-urban subsamples, all countries scored higher on the SWI in urban areas in 2008, with significant improvements in the rural areas of more affluent EU countries by 2018 as Austrian, Czech and German rural areas exhibited higher SWI scores than their urban counterparts.