Deprivation, Social Mobility Considerations, and Life Satisfaction: A Comparative Study of 33 European Countries

This study aims to provide a comparative analysis between non-transition and transition countries, with focus on exploring the life satisfaction costs of deprivation aspects, i.e. material, subjective, and relative. Relative deprivation is measured using the Gini index at the city level, since the Gini index at the country level is unable to capture the total influence of relative income inequality on life satisfaction for both sets of countries. A negative association between these measures and life satisfaction is suggestive of deprivation dimensions being quality-of-life important considerations in the EU and neighbouring candidate countries. They capture objective and subjective income inequalities among different households within the same time point. The relative importance of such indicators is also of particular interest because it is driven by social mobility considerations, which are more related with whether people think they can improve their lot in life and how easy/hard this is. This is more related to present versus future concerns about inequalities of same households across time. The study is based on a comparative analysis of data taken by a nationally representative household database from the 2016 European Quality of Life Survey. We evaluate the hypotheses using a two-level linear mixed-effects model of individual responses nested in 33 European countries (28 EU plus 5 non-EU countries—Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Turkey). Estimates are generated for the pooled sample and separately for the non-transition (West-EU) and transition post-communist (East-EU plus non-EU) countries. The results suggest that there are significant life satisfaction costs attached to all three aspects of deprivation. However, the comparative importance of relative deprivation, as a measure of income inequality at the city/local level, is significantly larger than material and subjective deprivation, even after controlling for equivalized household income. This relationship is more pronounced for transition countries as compared to non-transition (post-communist) ones.