COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING OF LATVIA’S INHABITANTS IN THE CONTEXT OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE BALTIC STATES

In the world, during the past 10 years, when evaluating development of a particular area, there has been a tendency to take into consideration those inhabitants’ subjective appraisal and attitude to the living conditions who live in this area, more often these indicators are the general life satisfaction and feeling of happiness. Analysing Latvia’s inhabitants’ subjective attitude author concludes that inhabitants of Latvia are very pessimistic in assessing their lives in this country. As surveys indicate, the economic factors have an important influence on people’s subjective satisfaction. The problem of the research is that during the last two years, there has been a tendency to improvement of economic indicators in Latvia, and also in Lithuania and Estonia, but when comparing the closest neighbours, the Latvian inhabitants’ subjective satisfaction with life is decreasing, but in Lithuania and Estonia it is increasing together with improvement of the economic situation. As a result, the author came to a conclusion that together with changes of the GDP indicator value, development of people’s subjective appraisal greatly depends on such economic indicators as income inequality, unemployment, inflation and financial assets