Subjective Well-Being: Estonia in an International Comparison

This paper focuses on two issues of subjective well-being: (1) the relative advantage of using either happiness or life satisfaction as an explanatory variable and either (relative) income or financial satisfaction as an independent variable, and (2) the difference in the level and the factors of subjective well-being between the whole sample countries and a typical transition country ñ Estonia. The analysis is performed using OLS, based on the World Values Study data from 1995-7. The results of the analysis suggest the advantage of using life satisfaction as a proxy for subjective well-being: life satisfaction is better explained by the same variables as happiness. The explanatory power of the Estonian equations is lower compared to equations based on the whole set of countries; however, the size and signs of coefficients are comparable, although with some interesting differences in the effects of, for example, income, education and immigrant status.