Subjective Well-Being and Quality of Life in Russian Regions

A number of cross-country ratings implement indicators of subjective well-being (SWB) as indicators of quality of life (QoL) in a country. They generally display rather predictable patterns, with wealthy nations with efficient institutions located at the top and developing nations near the bottom of the list. Nonetheless, some prior research and certain rating breaches point to a discrepancy between objective and subjective assessments. This discrepancy raises the question of whether SWB accurately reflects living conditions and if they can be applied universally to compare QoL across national and regional boundaries. We test this idea using objective and subjective measures for 60 regions of Russia. The QoL index produced by RIA-rating contains around 70 statistical indicators on different aspects of living conditions in each region. Subjective data collected through CATI in 2019-2020 contains assessments of 18 768 respondents (around 300 in each region). Those include: 1) questions on happiness and life satisfaction combined in the index of SWB; 2) perceptions of different aspects of regional infrastructure combined in the index of subjective QoL (SQoL). As the first step, we analyzed the data at the level of the regions, using regional means of subjective measures. Surprisingly, SWB demonstrated very little variation across Russian regions and did not correlate with either RIA or SQoL indices. In turn, SQoL score exhibited a significant Pearson correlation of 0.5 with the objective RIA index and performed much better for cross-regional comparisons. Further, we tested whether the relationship between objective conditions and SWB are mediated by the subjective perceptions of regional conditions using multilevel mediation analysis. It turns out that, at the individual level, SQoL is related to both objective conditions (r = 0.16) and SWB (r = 0.21), but it does not mediate the relationship as expected, even when socio-demographic differences are accounted for.