Housing Conditions and the Quality of Life of the Populations of the European Union Countries

Anna Oleńczuk-Paszel () and Agnieszka Sompolska-Rzechuła ()
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Anna Oleńczuk-Paszel: Department of Real Estate, Faculty of Economics, West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, 70-210 Szczecin, Poland
Agnieszka Sompolska-Rzechuła: Department of Mathematical Applications in Economy, Faculty of Economics, West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, 71-270 Szczecin, Poland

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 4, 1-25

Abstract: Quality of life (QoL) as a category, which is an overarching goal of sustainable development, dependent on many factors both objective and subjective, should be subjected to constant monitoring in various spatial, temporal and thematic arrangements. This study assesses the spatial differentiation of European Union countries in terms of QoL and housing conditions (HCs) of their populations. Interactions between the studied phenomena were also determined. A multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method—the TOPSIS method—and Spearman rank correlation coefficients were used to achieve the objectives of this study. The analysis was conducted using 2019 and 2022 data from the Eurostat database (including the EU-SILC survey) and TheGlobalEconomy.com. The research showed that the housing conditions and QoL of the populations of EU countries vary spatially, being more favorable in Austria, Ireland and Slovenia and the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Finland and Sweden and less favorable in Greece and some of the countries that joined the EU in 2004 and in 2007, viz. Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. This study noted a very strong positive correlation between the positions of countries in the rankings created with QoL in 2019 and 2022 (0.947) and with living conditions in the years under study (0.828), as well as a rather weak correlation between QoL and HCs in both 2019 (0.272) and 2022 (0.292). This article fills a research gap because, to our knowledge, the indicated phenomena have not been analyzed to date in the contexts presented in this article.

Keywords: housing conditions; quality of life; sustainability; TOPSIS method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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