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Wellbeing and the Region

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Abstract

This chapter updates and extends Chapter 15 “The Measurement of Regional Growth and Wellbeing” as it appeared in the 2014 handbook. The 6 years separating the two chapters have seen an expansion of the “wellbeing” field into many new areas of intellectual inquiry, policy, and practice.

Two conceptual frameworks hold considerable promise when it comes to understanding the spatial properties of the wellbeing function. The first framework is that introduced by development economist Amartya Sen and comprises the concepts of “capabilities” and “functionings.” The second framework draws on the work of behavioral psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner who had long advanced an ecology of human development in which economic and social contexts – from the home through to the global scale – condition the wellbeing of individuals as they grow. These two frameworks are rarely, if ever, considered together but have the potential to open up new ways in which the regional scientist can more fully understand the way space, place, and location condition wellbeing.

Both the Sen and Bronfenbrenner conceptualizations remain latent in the multilevel model – a suite of statistical tools used to explore contextual effects at multiple scales. Although increasingly applied within regional science, these multilevel modeling tools have often lacked the theoretical framework necessary to draw substantive meaning.

Four areas of current research are used to illustrate this relatively new area of regional science: the differential wellbeing associated with urban settlement; the relationship between average wellbeing and wellbeing inequality; the relationships between migration and wellbeing; and the temporal-spatial dynamics of wellbeing. Each area addresses context effects, that is, the influence of living in different economic, social, and cultural environments on people’s wellbeing. What is new and significant about current work in these areas is the attention now being paid to subjective wellbeing as a complement to the more traditional objective indicators such as income at the level of the individual and average income (GDP/capita) at the level of the region and country.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the following for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft: Arthur Grimes, Victoria University of Wellington; William Clark, University of California Los Angeles; Dimitris Ballas, University of Groningen; Martijn Hendriks, Erasmus Happiness Economics Research Organization (EHERO), and editor Jacques Poot, Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Philip S. Morrison

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  1. Philip S. Morrison
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Correspondence to Philip S. Morrison .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Manfred M. Fischer

  2. and Business Administration Department of Spatial Economics, Free University Faculty of Economics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter Nijkamp

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Morrison, P.S. (2020). Wellbeing and the Region. In: Fischer, M., Nijkamp, P. (eds) Handbook of Regional Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36203-3_16-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36203-3_16-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36203-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36203-3

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