No abstract

No abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to focus on the effects of interpersonal and institutional trust on welfare state support in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU). Design/methodology/approach The authors use micro-data from two rounds of a multinational survey conducted in these countries in 2010 and 2016. The outcome variable of interest is the willingness to pay more taxes to support the welfare state. The authors define the welfare state broadly, and focus on support for three main domains of the welfare state, namely, support for the needy, public healthcare and public education. Binomial regression is used to establish influence of interpersonal and institutional trust on welfare state support. Findings The authors find that both interpersonal and institutional trust have positive influences on strengthening support for the welfare state against a number of alternative explanations for public support for the welfare state. These positive effects remain the same for all three domains under investigation, namely, helping the needy, public healthcare and public education. Furthermore, these positive effects were observed both in the relatively less developed countries of the FSU and in the more developed Eastern European countries. Moreover, the positive effects of interpersonal and institutional trust on support for the needy, public healthcare and public education were found to grow over time. Research limitations/implications The findings indicate that the benefits of nurturing social capital will likely be substantial. Decision-makers, politicians, welfare state administrators and multinational founders (e.g. the UN and World Bank) should acknowledge the role played by trust in influencing the citizenry’s support for the allocation of financial resources toward the development and maintenance of the welfare state. The findings imply that welfare state reforms could prove be more effective within a social context where levels of trust are high. Thus, special attention should be paid to initiatives aimed at developing strategies to build trust. Practical implications Social welfare reforms in post-communist transitional countries may fail without active strategies aimed at nurturing institutional trust. One way to nurture institutional trust is through making additional efforts at enhancing the levels of accountability and transparency within a society as well as through increasing citizen engagement. Another way to build increased levels of trust is to take part in a variety of initiatives in good governance put forth by multinational initiatives. Originality/value As far as the authors know, this is the first paper which studies effect of interpersonal and institutional trust on support of the welfare state using a large and diverse sample of 27 countries over the period of five years. This is the first study which focuses on post-communist countries where trust is inherently low.

The article studies the causal effect of trust on the willingness to pay higher taxes to help the needy in a sample of 29 countries of Eastern and Southern Europe, and the former Soviet Union and Mongolia. It is hypothesized that interpersonal trust leads to a greater willingness to pay taxes to help the needy since (i) trust increases the likelihood of helping strangers; (ii) trust fosters solidarity and cooperation when working to solve common problems in society; and (iii) trust reduces suspicion with respect to the perceived misuse of redistributed money. Three key findings are that the more people trust each other, the more they are ready to support the welfare state; the effect of trust on welfare state support holds even in a contextual environment characterized by rather lower levels of trust and relatively underdeveloped systems of redistribution; and higher individual‐level trust fosters tax morale and helps deter tax evasion.

A causal association was found between higher levels of corruption and lower levels of satisfaction with local and national governments. However, interaction term analysis provides suggestive evidence that: first, as public service satisfaction increases, the effects of corruption change from negative values to positive values for both local and national governments; second, as political situations improve, the negative effects of corruption diminish for both local and national governments; and, third, as the economic situation improves, the negative effects of corruption diminish for local, but not for national governments.

SummaryIn this study, we examine the effects of having a healthy weight in form of a healthy body mass index (BMI) on life satisfaction using the data from a diverse sample of 27 post‐communist transitional countries. We find that a healthy BMI significantly raises life satisfaction, while an increase in BMI reduces life satisfaction. We also find that the positive effect of a healthy BMI on life satisfaction substantially diminishes as the political and economic situation improves. Equally, the positive effect of healthy BMI on life satisfaction is considerably lower for those who exhibit higher levels of institutional trust and express trust in government, parliament, and political parties. Classic regression models such as ordinary least squares (OLS) and ordered probit significantly underestimate the true effect of healthy BMI on life satisfaction. Such results suggest that unobserved confounders, measurement error, or their interplay appear to be the main source (s) of bias that eventually lead to a significant underestimation of the true effect of BMI on life satisfaction through classic regression models.

We study the factors that influence willingness to pay to improve public health care in 29 post-communist countries, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Eurasia using 2 up-to-date cross-sectional surveys conducted in 2010 and 2016 (N = 34 768). Three hypotheses received full degree of support through empirical analysis: increase in satisfaction with health care, university education, and higher level of wealth positively associated with willingness to pay in all regions. In comparison, having a higher level social trust and adhering to left-leaning ideological position strengthens support for public health care in Southern Europe and Eurasia only, while having a higher level of institutional trust strengthens support for public health care in Eastern Europe and Eurasia only.

Objectives: To evaluate the effect of height on life satisfaction. Methods:We use data from a recent multi-country survey that was conducted in 27 nations. Results: Our main finding is that height does have a strong positive effect on life satisfaction. These findings remain positive and significant when we use a comprehensive set of well-known covariates of life-satisfaction at both the individual and country levels. These findings also remain robust to alternative statistical specifications. Conclusions: From a theoretical standpoint, our findings suggest that height is important in explaining life-satisfaction independent of other well-known determinants. From a methodological standpoint, the findings of this study highlight the need to explicitly control for the effect of heights in studies on subjective wellbeing, happiness, and life-satisfaction.