Assessment and Determinants of the Quality of Life in Portuguese Cities

Abstract

The quality of life (QoL) in cities has increasingly been used as a symbol of urban success. Studies addressing this issue tend to focus, however, on large cities and/or on cities from different countries. By using a set of data from a single country, comprehending cities with different population sizes and densities, observations for 11 performance dimensions, and an approach combining the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique and multivariate regression modeling, this study analyses the QoL of Portuguese cities and explores some of its determinants. The results of this analysis show that both small and large cities can offer high levels of QoL with “transport and accessibility,” “safety,” “housing,” “education,” and “culture and entertainment” being the dimensions that most contribute to the QoL assessment. While Lisbon and Oporto (the two largest Portuguese cities) are benchmark cities, some of the highly populated cities located in their Metropolitan Areas present the most potential for improvement in terms of QoL. The results also show that cities located in the hinterland tend to present higher QoL scores than those on the coast. Equally, cities with lower population size and density, those that are district capitals and those with higher per capita current public expenditures present higher levels of QoL. These findings suggest, therefore, that the cities’ typology, their population size and density, and their dependence from local governments’ public expenditures can significantly contribute to the differences identified in their QoL performance.

Urban Quality of Life and Production Amenity in Chinese Cities

“…For residents, the influencing factors of urban QOL are consistent with the results of previous literature. Rappaport (2007), Albouy (2008Albouy ( , 2013Albouy ( , 2016, Berger et al (2008), Barreira (2020), Zheng, et al (2021), and other scholars have studied urban QOL in U.S., Canadian, Russian, Portuguese, and Chinese cities, and suggested that the climate, education resources, facilities, and environment are the key factors to improve urban QOL [9][10][11][21][22][23][24][25][26][39][40][41]. Due to limits of data availability, we used numbers of hospitals and doctors as a proxy of health care, numbers of college teachers as a proxy of education level, and exclude crime rate, and traffic congestions in city features.…”

“…Wang et al (2019) measured the QOL in the Chinese city Tianjin and concluded that higher urban QOL is correlated with a shorter distance from the residential place to the central business district and the better urban facilities and environment [21]. Barreira (2020) analyzed the urban QOL in Portugal, and found that the geographical location, population size and density, and the dependence on government public expenditure significantly affected the urban QOL [22]. Chen (2019) and Shi (2021) quantified and ranked the QOL in Chinese cities based on the Rosen-Roback model using both the China Urban Household Survey Data and the 1% Census Data in 2005 [23,24].…”

“…Barreira (2020) Portugal 2020 Geographical location, population size and density, and the dependence on government public expenditure [22].…”

The impact of quality of life on industrial and agricultural production and environmental efficiency in China's provinces

“…Their study pointed out that local economic development promotes the improvement of QoL. Barreira et al (2020) analyzed QoL in Portugal's cities and explored some of its determinants, finding that cities with higher per capita public expenditures exhibit higher QoL levels.…”

Assessing the Influence of Strategic Resources on the Quality of Life in Spanish Cities

“…However, there are not many examples of specific estimations of QoL in municipalities within specific countries in Europe. Recent examples are [167] for Italy and [163,168] for Portugal. As for Spain, the authors of [169] carried out studies for different regions of the country, and more recently, the authors of [11,170,171] focused on municipalities and cities.…”