Adolescents’ (Un)happiness in Transition

In this paper, we analyse the life satisfaction of adolescents in transition countries, comparing their life satisfaction to the life satisfaction of their peers in non-transition countries. We find that at the start of transition, ceteris paribus, the life satisfaction of adolescents in our sample of transition countries did not differ much from the life satisfaction of adolescents in our sample of non-transition countries. With the economic crisis of the early nineties, however, the difference increased dramatically but by the beginning of the 2000s this gap had again become fairly limited. From that point, respondents’ health situation, their material wealth and their school experience mattered much more than where they lived. Unlike the literature on adults, we find that macro-variables cannot explain much of the happiness gap between transition and non-transition countries.