Constraints, Domain Conditions, and Well‐Being: Evidence from Poland during the Transformation

The relationships among the recent changes in socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the household, domain conditions (objective well-being), and the household members' assessment of their situation (subjective well-being) are assessed with data from 600 households in the province of Lublin, Poland. Four domains are included in the measures of recent change, domain conditions, and well-being: housing, household equipment, food consumption, and transportation. As expected, domain conditions are a function of household constraints; well-being is a function of domain conditions and recent change. Rural residents have significantly poorer domain conditions than urban residents, but report significantly higher levels of well-being. Beginning with Joseph Davis' (1945) classic exposition of the relationship between the level of living (the goods and services currently enjoyed by a group of people) and standard of living (the goods and services to which they aspire), social scientists have focused on the nexus between objective conditions and the subjective evaluations of those conditions. Poland's transformation from a planned economy to a market economy offers an opportunity to examine level of living and well-being under rapid and extreme change. This study examines the influence of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics and household domain conditions on subjective well-being among a sample of 600 households from the province of Lublin, Poland, in the late fall of 1994. Of particular concern is the measurement of domain conditions through the assessment of the levels of consumption. The Polish situation is outlined in the first section, followed by a review of theoretical and empirical work on subjective well-being. The concept ual model and hypotheses are then presented, followed by methods, findings, and conclusions. THE POLISH TRANSFORMATION In 1989, Poland's ruling Communist Party was defeated by Solidarity-backed candidates in the national elections. The Communist Party's last-ditch efforts to appease the electorate, however, caused Poland's economic situation to deteriorate rapidly (Slay 1994). By mid-1989, monthly inflation rates were close to double digits, labor unrest was mounting, the state budget deficit was burgeoning.the government decided. to liberalize prices of most food products. As a result, food prices more than doubled in a single month (Lane 1992, 10). In the fall of 1989, the newly-elected Solidarity government decided to begin the transformation to a market economy. The market reforms meant a steep fall in output (Winiecki 1994) and higher unemployment (Kolodko and Rutkowski 1991) from a rate of less than one percent in January of 1990 (Sachs 1992) to more than twelve percent by June of 1992 (Palaszewska-Reindl et al. 1992). In addition, through complicated formulae, wage increases were deliberately kept below the rate of inflation (Kramer 1995). Analyses of aggregate data on household income, consumption, and expenditures between 1989 and 1992 (Palaszewska-Reindl 1998) indicate the depths of the problem for Polish households. Some who moved quickly to start a business saw an increase in household income, but for the majority, there were large reductions in real income (Palaszewska-Reindl 1998). The percentage of income spent on food decreased slightly, the percentage devoted to "other expenditures" almost tripled, and savings were cut almost in half (Palaszewska-Reindl 1998). In late autumn of 1993, Winiecki (1994) said, ". the long awaited recovery from 'transformational recession' has finally arrived, at least in three out of the four countries [the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia] under consideration" (709). His analyses of macroeconomic data suggest that recovery was strongest in Poland, as assessed by the growth in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and growth in the private sector. Some analyses suggest that, after the transformation, Poles have enjoyed higher levels of living than in pretransformation times (Kramer 1995; Winiecki 1994). …