Household Happiness and Fuel Poverty: a Cross-Sectional Analysis on Turkey

Abstract

In recent years, self-reported happiness and fuel poverty have both become hotly-debated topics in the literature. Since both of them affect people's quality of life, they are certainly worth serious consideration. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct a household-level analysis on the association between happiness and fuel poverty taking advantage of other housing characteristics. We used ordered logit model utilizing Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT)'s 2014-2018 Life Satisfaction Survey (LSS) data for the analysis. Our dependent variable is household happiness. The results show that household fuel poverty is negatively associated with household happiness in Turkey. A positive association exists between becoming home-owner and household happiness in the country; however, it becomes mostly negative after considering odds ratios. On the other hand, there is a positive association between climbing income ladder and household happiness in the country. Also, the presence of men in households is found to be negatively associated with household happiness in Turkey. Our results imply a U-shaped association between age groups in households and household happiness in the country. Finally, we found that the association between an increase in household size and household happiness varies across each category of the independent variable. This is also the case for the association between number of rooms and household happiness as well as for the association between dwelling area and household happiness in Turkey.