Health or Happiness? What Is the Impact of Physical Activity on the Individual?

Abstract

This paper models the effect that physical activity such as sports participation and active travel, through walking and cycling, has on self-reported health and well-being. The results show that physical activity and active travel mainly have a positive effect on both individual health and well-being. Although, cycling has health benefits, it also appears to involve some disutility, which requires further investigation. Copyright � 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Subjective well-being in European countries—on the age-specific impact of physical activity

“…Theoretically, one might argue that an ordered measurement of SWB and binary covariates would be most suitable. However, the SWB research has shown that the choice of estimator is not of significance in the findings [17,36]. There are other advantages too.…”

“…[36], there is no study that investigates whether the magnitude of this impact is age-specific, although, it is also well known that sport participation is strongly influenced by age [5,12,24,33]. Consequently, this paper seeks to make a unique contribution to the existing literature by exploring the age-specific effects of sports participation on SWB for a broad cross-section of 19 European countries.…”

“…Based on cross-section UK data from the Taking Part Survey, Rasciute and Downward [36] explore how a binary variable measuring participation in any of 67 sports, as well as binary variables measuring walking and cycling activity affect ordinal measures of happiness and subjectively defined health. The walking variable was disaggregated to account for both recreational and utilitarian walking.…”

“…2 Initial analysis suggests, for example, that sport comprises between 3% and 3.7% of consumer expenditure, 2.2% and 4.0% of gross value added and 2.0% and 5.8% of employment across countries [15, available at http://ec.europa.eu/sport/library/doc/b1/madrid_forum_ sport_satellite_account_leaflet.pdf, accessed 14 June 2011]. 3 The World Health Organisation estimates that up to 60% of the world's population does not undertake the physical activity required to obtain health benefits, which are also identified as a component of SWB [36]. Such inactivity translates into considerable health care costs equivalent to £2 billion for the UK [10]; Canadian $2.1 billion, which is about 2.5% of the total, in Canada [28]; US $24.3 billion or 2.4% of the total for the USA [9] and CHF2.4 billion or 16% of total health care costs for Switzerland [38].…”

Socioeconomic perspectives on physical activity and aging

“…While growing evidence exists that sports participation increases SWB (e.g., [12,14]), there is no study that investigates whether the magnitude of this impact is agespecific. This is surprising since, as mentioned above, sports participation and engagement in physical activity have a strong age-specific profile.…”