| Description: |
This paper reviews what happens when measures of wellbeing are applied in societies in transformation; empirical data comes from representative surveys in eight successor countries of the Soviet Union. It sets out five empirically testable hypotheses about influences on wellbeing: material conditions, health, human capital, social capital and context. It tests hypotheses with self-reported happiness as the dependent variable. Given the inter-relationship between health and happiness at both the conceptual and empirical level, it also uses two-stage OLS regression analysis to assess empirically the extent to which health and happiness are independent of each other or alternative indicators of the same underlying concept of wellbeing.
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