Ms Marije Kooistra (p)

In pursuit of liveability, policymakers increasingly rely on wellbeing reports, surveys, and composite indices to monitor progress toward becoming desirable places to live. These instruments typically focus on the overall level of wellbeing within a region (e.g., life satisfaction) and on local sources of wellbeing such as health, housing, and the environment. Yet regions do not exist in isolation: residents may benefit from wellbeing resources in neighbouring regions or suffer from negative externalities. While spatial spillovers are well established in regional science, wellbeing monitoring frameworks largely treat neighbouring regions as benchmarks for comparison rather than as contributors to wellbeing itself. Ignoring these interdependencies may lead to suboptimal policy decicions in which regions attempt to optimise all domains internally instead of considering complementarity. For example, an urban municipality with limited green space may achieve higher life satisfaction when located next to a rural municipality rich in environmental amenities than when surrounded by similarly dense urban areas. This raises the question: does the diversity of soucres of wellbeing across neighbouring regions enhance overall wellbeing?

This paper examines the spatial interdependence of wellbeing across Dutch municipalities using the Dutch “broad prosperity” framework, which comprises seven wellbeing domains. We estimate domain-specific spillovers using a Spatial Durbin Model, allowing us to decompose life satisfaction into contributions arising from local conditions and from neighbouring municipalities. We further construct a domain-based dissimilarity index to assess whether variation in neighbouring municipalities’ wellbeing profiles is associated with higher life satisfaction outcomes.

Ms Gabriela Carmen Pascariu (p), Ms Ioana-Maria Ursache

Recent literature on urban liveability emphasizes its multidimensional and relational character, going beyond the traditional approach based on economic conditions and performance. It is the result of complex interactions between the opportunities offered by cities and their vulnerabilities, both economically, socially and environmentally, between perceptions and structural urban performance, between objective and subjective determinants. In this perspective, cities are not only engines of growth, but also spaces of common convention and conviviality, as well as of unequal distribution of opportunities and vulnerabilities, in which well-being depends on access to economic, social and institutional capabilities (Sen, 1999; Golubchenko et al., 2024; OECD, 2020); Samavati, 2024; Uchida, 2024; Vittersø, 2025).
Specifically, in Central and Eastern Europe, post-socialist transformation processes have generated differentiated patterns of urban development, characterized by socio-economic polarization, digital divide, various forms of gentrification and infrastructural disparities (Lang et al., 2015), which are still insufficiently analyzed and known, as a key condition of urban transformability in contemporary development processes.
The present study aims to contribute to reducing this knowledge gap, by investigating the relationship between subjective well-being and capabilities, using survey data collected in 10 cities in Romania (over 130,000 inhabitants, excluding Bucharest) and urban structural indicators. The research conceptualizes liveability as a dependent variable resulting from the interaction between urban opportunities and structural vulnerabilities and highlights the particularities and inequalities of urban development in Romania. Well-being is operationalized through a composite index derived from items on general life satisfaction, existential meaning, work-life balance, energy level and perception of control over one's life. The perception analysis is carried out according to 4 clusters of determinants.
Methodologically, the research is focused on exploratory factor analysis to validate the cluster structure, associated with multivariate regressions and hierarchical models (HLM) to estimate the relative contribution of each cluster to determining well-being. To highlight inequalities, interactions between clusters and socio-demographic variables (income, education, age) are included, as well as inter-city comparisons based on standardized scores. The existence of cumulative or compensatory effects between dimensions is also tested (for example, whether digital performance can mitigate economic vulnerabilities).
The research identified specific patterns of liveability, inter & intra-city differences, and highlights the mechanisms through which economic, digital and environmental inequalities translate into well-being gaps. The main contribution lies in the development of an integrated empirical framework that allows the assessment of structural determinants and their unequal distribution in urban space, from the perspective of perceived well-being.

Prof. Corneliu IATU (p), Silviu Grecu, Dr. Bianca Sofia Teodoru

This paper investigates whether consumption-based environmental indicators explain cross-national differences in happiness better than traditional territorial measures. While GDP has historically dominated development assessment, increasing attention is now given to multidimensional measures of well-being such as the Happiness Index. Simultaneously, globalization has altered the geography of environmental impacts, allowing developed economies to externalize carbon-intensive production through international trade.
Using a longitudinal panel dataset covering more than 140 countries between 2012 and 2024, the study integrates subjective well-being indicators from the World Happiness Report with environmental variables including territorial and consumption-based CO2 emissions, Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Ecological Footprint (gha per capita), and the Natural Environment pillar of the Legatum Prosperity Index.
The empirical analysis relies primarily on Fixed-Effects panel regressions to control for unobserved country-specific heterogeneity. The models also incorporate standard determinants of happiness, including GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom of choice, and perceptions of corruption.
Preliminary findings indicate that environmental quality indicators, particularly EPI and Natural Environment scores, are positively associated with higher happiness levels. In contrast, Ecological Footprint effects weaken significantly once environmental governance variables are introduced. Most importantly, consumption-based CO2 emissions demonstrate stronger explanatory power than territorial emissions, suggesting that contemporary well-being is increasingly linked to globalized consumption structures rather than domestic production alone.
The paper contributes to regional science by highlighting spatial inequalities embedded in global production-consumption systems and by proposing a framework for evaluating sustainable well-being within planetary boundaries. The findings support the argument that environmental governance and ecological efficiency are essential components of resilient and inclusive regional development.

Bibliography
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Mr Paulo França (p), Dr Tatiane Menezes

Since the late 1990s, Brazil has experienced some important economic developments such as a macroeconomic stabilization, the expansion of social programs and a sustained economic growth supported by favorable external factors. These transformations motivated extensive research on topics such as inequality and poverty, but there has been given less attention to welfare analysis per se. Since conventional metrics such as GDP, nominal income and expenditure often miss key dimensions of household well-being, this absence translates into a gap in the welfare economics literature.

This study contributes to this literature by constructing a spatially adjusted Welfare Index that addresses these limitations commonly associated with traditional metrics. We define a welfare-enhancing consumption bundle, apply equivalence scales to account for household composition and economies of scale and estimate a spatial price deflator using the weighted Country-Product Dummy (CPD) method, a hedonic regression approach widely used for regional Purchasing Power Parity adjustments to correct metropolitan price differentials for different locations.

Using microdata from the Household Budget Surveys (POF) for the years 2002–2003, 2008–2009 and 2017–2018, we employ First and Second-Order Stochastic Dominance tests and Growth Incidence Curves (GIC) to analyze welfare dynamics across time, regions and income brackets. We find significant welfare dispersion across metropolitan regions, highlighting how income disparities translate into welfare inequalities. In an intertemporal perspective, results indicate a first-order dominance relationship between periods, characterizing Pareto-improving growth that was strongly pro-poor. These dynamics exhibit high regional heterogeneity. To conclude, we perform some sensitivity analyses regarding different equivalence scales, deflation methods and consumption bundles. Through a robustness matrix and first-order dominance relations, we show that results are robust to different equivalence scales and deflation methods and are sensitive to the composition of the consumption bundle, which reinforces the importance of properly defining welfare indices to study welfare dynamics rigorously.