Economic development and emotional well-being: longitudinal evidence from 33 European countries

The relationship between economic development and emotional well-being is less well understood than the corresponding relationship with life satisfaction, partly because prior cross-national studies have often relied on brief dichotomous affect measures. Using four waves of the European Social Survey (2006, 2012, 2014, and 2023), we aggregated responses from 177,948 respondents in 33 countries to 97 country-round observations and linked these observations to real GDP per capita. We found strong positive associations between GDP and both emotional well-being and life satisfaction across countries. Longitudinal mixed models showed positive associations between GDP and both well-being components over time. Supplementary checks using separate affect components, quadratic GDP specifications, demographic-composition controls, contextual adjustment for social trust and income inequality, attenuation models with perceived income adequacy and unemployment, and growth-versus-decline tests broadly supported this pattern. Overall, the findings challenge previous conclusions that economic development is only weakly related to affect. When emotional well-being is measured with graded content-valid affect items, it shows a clear positive relationship with both GDP levels and changes in GDP.