ESTIMATING THE EFFECT OF MUNICIPAL ENVIRONMENTAL INDICATORS ON LIFE SATISFACTION: EVIDENCE FROM TURKEY

The municipalities in Turkey have a great extent statutory tools on coping with the environmental issues. Solid waste management, environmental health, and environmental management are among these responsibilities written merely down in the Municipal Law. Taking the Metropolitan Municipality Law into consideration, it is explicit that metropolitan municipalities own greater extent duties and powers than the other municipalities. In addition to these and according to the same Law mayors also have a responsibility, which is also a power, that is to take proper measures for tranquillity, well-being, health and happiness of the inhabitants. The municipalities necessarily, thus, have to provide the life satisfaction of their inhabitants through their several facilities. This study aims to estimate the effect of environmental factors, which are in the scope of municipalities’ responsibilities, on life satisfaction. In this regard, we use both the indicator values of well-being index for provinces and the environmental statistics released by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) by the year 2015 and 2018, respectively. Secondary, we also incorporated the environmental expenditures of the municipalities announced by the Ministry of Treasury and Finance into the model employed in the study. We employed the ordered logistic regression to estimate the effect of independent environmental variables on our dependent variable “the life satisfaction”. The main results of our estimation indicate that some environmental factors, such as number of municipalities served by a sewerage system, the rate of municipal population served by drinking water treatment plants, the rate of the forest area per km2 and environmental expenditures of municipalities, have positive effects at several degrees on the life satisfaction of the inhabitants in the case of Turkey.

Keywords

Environmental indicators, life satisfaction, municipalities in Turkey, happiness, ordered-logit