Well-being and the Great Recession in Spain

ABSTRACT

This letter assesses the impact of the Great Recession on well-being in Spanish provinces using two alternative composite indicators of objective well-being that include somewhat different dimensions. Whereas the crisis notably eroded economic well-being, its impact on overall well-being – which in addition to economic dimensions also includes non-economic ones – was imperceptible. This result points to the need to carefully define and assess well-being in empirical analyses.

KEYWORDS:

• Composite indicators
• economic crisis
• Spain
• well-being

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C61
• I30

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the comments and suggestions from two referees.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Spanish provinces correspond to NUTS 3 in the Eurostat nomenclature, while regions correspond to NUTS 2. The autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla have been excluded from the analysis.

² Weights correspond to the provinces’ population as a share of the total regional population in each period.

³ For the case of provinces, Spearman rank correlation coefficients are statistically significant with p-values of 0.095 and 0.002 for the growth and crisis periods, respectively.

⁴ We have also computed a non-economic well-being indicator excluding the dimensions of income and jobs from the overall indicator. Results show that average non-economic well-being during the crisis (0.800) is noticeably higher than in the preceding growth period (0.624). Results for this indicator at the province and region levels are available to readers on request.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by the European Regional Development Fund and the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (ECO2014-55221-P, ECO2017-85746-P and ECO2016-75237-R); the Valencian regional government (PROMETEO/2018/102); and the Universitat Jaume I (UJI-B2017-33).