The perception of air pollution and noise in urban environments: A subjective indicator across European countries

Although urbanization has been a fundamental feature of economic development, increasingly important concerns about environmental quality have led to a wide-ranging debate about the concept of urban sustainability. In this paper, we examine how living in urban areas affects people's perceptions of two specific aspects of environmental quality, namely, air pollution and noise. Specifically, for every country, we develop an indicator that is based on these perceptions. The findings confirm that among European countries, the effects of urban agglomerations on the households' perceptions of environmental quality reflect a certain degree of heterogeneity. The proposed indicator provides new evidence about previously unexplored interactions between perceptions and macro-economic factors, such as income inequality, public spending on the environment and public debt. Through a comparison with an objective measure of the exposure of urban inhabitants to noise and air pollution, we find support for the intuition that subjective perceptions can be employed jointly with objective indicators to obtain full and comprehensive knowledge of the quality of urban environments.