The quality of life in England and Wales

Abstract

Local amenities play an important role in determining where we choose to live and our overall quality of life. In many cases, however, amenities do not have prices and will therefore be underprovided by the market. In this paper, we use county level data for England and Wales to estimate implicit amenity prices and to calculate an index of quality of life for each county. Among our findings is a large negative price on air pollution. The range in quality of life across counties is estimated to be in excess of two thousand pounds per year. Keywords; quality of life index, amenities, hedonic prices JEL classification: I31, R1