Camilla Lenzi, Giovanni Perucca (p)

A recent but already rich stream of the literature in regional studies focused on what was labelled as “geography of discontent”. This expression refers to the unhappiness experienced by people living in lagging-behind areas, characterized by poor opportunities and economic growth (Dikstra et al., 2019). Discontent has been typically measured by the electoral preferences for Eurosceptic and populist parties, mirroring the anti-system sentiments of those left behind by the pervasive processes of modern post-industrial economic transformation. Broad empirical evidence showed that anti-EU voting is strongly and significantly influenced by the economic change occurred in European regions. The surprising result, however, is that once having controlled for recent regional economic trend, areas with higher per capita GDP are more likely than the others to vote for Eurosceptic parties. The scope of this paper is to delve into this issue, by introducing two important. First, individual discontent is measured in terms of subjective wellbeing. Compared with the use of electoral data, survey data on perceived life satisfaction has the great advantage of taking into account also individual determinants of discontent. Second, the role of the lack of socio-economic opportunities, traditionally measured as growth disparities across regions, is here assessed also in terms of within-area economic inequality. Well-off regions are in fact those characterized by the highest levels of income and wealth polarization, and considering this phenomenon could help explaining the geography of discontent.

Dijkstra, L., Poelman, H., & Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2019). The geography of EU discontent. Regional Studies, 1-17.

Cristina Bernini, Silvia Emili , Federica Galli (p)

This study aims at investigating the role that individual happiness has on consumption behaviour and whether this relationship is affected by the urbanization settings where citizens live. With respect to previous literature on this issue, our study presents some novelties. First, we focus on the differences in the individual expenditures-happiness nexus with respect to different urbanization levels in order to detect possible disparities. Second, we investigate the role of happiness over the entire expenditure distribution by means of a quantile modelling approach. Third, the expenditure -happiness nexus is analysed with respect to different domain satisfactions, allowing to better investigate the multidimensionality of the happiness concept. To analyse the urbanization disparities in the consumption and happiness relationship, individual data are required. The not availability of joint information on consumption and happiness at the unit level, as in Italy, may be overcoming by using a statistical matching method. In particular, the matching of the Household Budget Survey (HBS) with the Aspects of Daily Life survey (ADL) provides information at the individual level, useful to investigate how expenditure is affected the happiness of Italian citizens. We model expenditure on happiness by using a quantile regression to depict different intensities of the impact of individual satisfaction levels on expenditure at the different urbanization levels. Preliminary findings highlight a different role of happiness both across the entire expenditure distribution and the urbanization settings.

Filippo Tassinari (p), Lukas Kleine-Rueschkamp , Paolo Veneri

This paper assesses the differences in quality of life across different types of settlements at the global level. Besides the global scope of the analysis, the novelty of the paper is that of combining the micro-data from a global survey to a consistent definition of cities, towns & semi-dense areas and rural areas across the whole world. Such definition – henceforth the Degree of Urbanisation – makes it possible to classify, at a spatial detail of 1-square kilometre, the entire global inhabited surface into three categories, based on population size and density and using population gridded data. By using the information on the location of survey respondents, we combine the individual microdata from Gallup World Poll with the Degree of Urbanisation. This approach makes it possible to avoid the bias emerging from country-based or subjective definitions used in previous studies addressing the same research question (Berry & Okulicz-Kozaryn, 2011), (Knight & Gunatilaka, 2010), (Valente & Berry, 2016). The analysis includes more than 160,000 individuals residing in cities, towns & semi-dense areas or rural areas in more than 110 different countries around the world. Overall, we find that people living in cities have consistently higher levels of life satisfaction, although they are less satisfied with the material living standards that they can access. Differences in life satisfaction hold after controlling for individual characteristics, although they become low in magnitude. Those differences are particularly high in less developed countries and life satisfaction is sensitive to city size. People living in a functional urban area have higher life satisfaction, on average, with large metropolitan areas between one and five million people showing the highest levels of life satisfaction.