Prague Economic Papers 2021, 30(5):529-551 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.783

Synthetic Indicators of Quality of Subjective Life in the EU: Rural and Urban Areas

María-Carmen Sánchez-Sellero ORCID...a, Beatriz García-Carro ORCID...a, Pedro Sánchez-Sellero ORCID...b
a Department of Economy, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, A Coruña, University of A Coruña, Spain
b Department of Business Administration, School of Engineering, Zaragoza, University of Zaragoza, Spain

The aim of this paper is to develop subjective synthetic indicators that quantify the quality of life in the different countries of the EU-28, with data from the 2016 European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS). We add other indicators to the general synthetic ones in order to quantify the different dimensions of quality life due to its multidimensional nature. The successive but unchained application of the principal component analysis and the Mazziota-Pareto analysis allows us to classify 5 dimensions of quality of life: subjective component of governance, public services, environment, general satisfaction with life, and socioeconomic issues. We verify that countries with the lowest or highest positions in the general index usually keep that position in most dimensions. The spatial perspective is fundamental to study of regional development. For this reason, the next objective is the analysis of differences by spatial location using the variance analysis. The general indicator shows significant differences between EU countries but it does not show differences in the quality of life of European citizens in urban and rural areas.

Keywords: Quality of life, European Union, subjective indicators, aggregation methods, spatial dimension, satisfaction
JEL classification: C42, C51, F01, I31

Received: November 11, 2020; Revised: May 20, 2021; Accepted: June 30, 2021; Prepublished online: August 11, 2021; Published: October 22, 2021  Show citation

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Sánchez-Sellero, M., García-Carro, B., & Sánchez-Sellero, P. (2021). Synthetic Indicators of Quality of Subjective Life in the EU: Rural and Urban Areas. Prague Economic Papers, 30(5), 529-551. doi: 10.18267/j.pep.783
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