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May 2022

Local Authority wellbeing over time

Local Authority wellbeing over time

Introduction

The wellbeing of the population is an important concern for governments at local and national level. The UK has been among the small number of countries to systematically measure subjective wellbeing, adding a new lens to the health of the nation that provide a distinct measure from economic wellbeing measured through GDP.

This data has been collected for some time and estimated at the level of the local authority across the UK, and these aggregated data are publicly available through national statistics. In this short paper, we consider;

  1. How wellbeing has changed over the last 10 years at local authority level
  2. Whether this experience has been uniform across the country, how it has changed over time, and how it responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  3. Whether we can make the first step towards quasi-experimental evaluations of wellbeing by matching local authorities across different time periods in terms of their prior trends of wellbeing.
Close Introduction

How has wellbeing changed over the last ten years?

Which authorities have improved most during the last ten years?

Has the change during the pandemic been uniform?

Which authorities suffered the most in terms of wellbeing during the pandemic?

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You may also wish to read the blog article on this document.

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