Let’s all get pessimistic about ill-being: civil society and political organisation mediations

Unemployment, job vulnerability, and inflation are among the economic events that generate stress and anxiety in the population. People express their anxiety by reporting ill-being. We evaluate the extent to which negative economic events translate into reported ill-being for the European countries between 2005 and 2019. Our objective is to identify countries that produce the lowest level of ill-being at a given level of negative economic events. We utilize a benchmarking technique called data envelopment analysis. While the standard version of this technique has been used to understand well-being, the standard version cannot explain ill-being. Therefore, we are the first to employ the non-standard version of this technique in the well-being literature known as anti-efficiency or pessimistic DEA. We find that Nordic countries tend to perform best in mitigating the influence of negative economic events on ill-being. Additionally, we discover that countries with well- organized public administration are better at containing ill-being.