No Man is an Island, the Inter-personal Determinants of Regional Well-Being in Europe

There is a strong need to complement the analysis of social well-being at the European regional level to supplement existing, predominantly economic analysis. This work extends the measurement of well-being across the EU-15 regions in several ways. First, we assess the determinants of well-being using a multilevel modelling approach using data at the national, regional and individual levels. Second, we have extended the model to account for group effects, as well as intrinsic socio-demographic indicators and higher-level exogenous contextual factors. Empirical findings support the idea that well-being is strongly dependent both on group effects and on more specific individual characteristics. We find that there is some evidence of greater regional effects relative to national effect.