Urbanisation, Poverty and Subjective Well-Being: Empirical Evidence from Thailand

This article uses multivariate analyses to investigate whether urban settings have effects on four well-being measures, namely, life satisfaction, happiness level, mental score and illness in the previous month. The results show that after controlling for individual socio-economic factors, urban settings still have negative effects on life satisfaction while urban settings have no statistically significant effects on happiness level, mental score and the likelihood of being ill. In addition, the article suggests that being poor has statistically significant negative effects on all of the four measures of well-being, with stronger effects of poverty in rural settings. The article also suggests that individual factors may serve as moderators of urban-rural poverty differences as some of the effects of urban settings disappear after controlling for individual socio-economic backgrounds.