Factors Affecting Well-Being at the State Level in the United States

United States (US) policy makers often rely on economic indicators in order to determine citizens’ well-being. Authors of other research in the area of well-being have reported that well-being is a function of other factors beyond just income including health indicators such as physical and mental health, social interactions such as employment and productivity, and politics. Therefore, inclusion of these other factors would better capture variations in well-being. In this paper, well-being in each of the fifty states in the US is assessed using a mixed panel model approach (2009–2011) including typical economic and political measures. The findings from the empirical analysis reveal higher level of equality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, was the strongest indicator of well-being. Conversely, in states considered as politically conservative, an inverse relation was shown to exist between higher levels of state conservative politics and levels of average well-being by state. Finally, per capita income growth was difficult to measure as it related to well-being due to the fluctuations attributed to the recession of 2008. Therefore, state policies focused only on economic measures could not be verified whereas the income equality and/lower levels of income disparity would benefit the state population, as a whole, in terms of well-being.