Subjective Well-being, Income, and Ethnicity in Slovakia

ABSTRACT

This paper utilizes two measures of subjective well-being to test a hypothesis that a marginal increase in subjective well-being associated with a marginal increase in income is larger for poorer than for richer populations. This hypothesis is examined in the setting of Slovak Roma, who are poor in comparison to the non-Roma population. The results suggest that the correlation between income and satisfaction is greater for the lower-income group (the Roma) than for the higher-income group (majority population). However, the correlation between income and emotional well-being does not significantly differ between the two groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Satisfaction
• emotional well-being
• Roma
• income
• poverty

Availability of data

The EU-SILC datasets were made available on the basis of contract between the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic, and the Technical University of Kosice. The EU-SILC-MRK 2018 (OSGPRC, 2020) dataset is available on the Ministry of Interior of the Slovak Republic website: https://www.minv.sk/?zber-a-analyza-dat

Responsibility for all conclusions drawn from the data lies entirely with the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Equivalised disposable income is the total income of a household (after tax and other deductions), divided by the equivalised household size applying the modified OECD scale. The scale gives a weight of 1.0 to the first adult; 0.5 to the second and each subsequent person aged 14 and over; and 0.3 to each child under 14.

2. Including the quadratic term of logarithmic transformation of income did not change the main findings reported in this study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract No. APVV-19-0329.