How much happiness is there in the world? A cross-country study

Abstract

This paper complements the burgeoning literature on country-specific studies of happiness by taking a global look at happiness and its determinants. In so doing, it makes two contributions. First, it presents indicators of happiness that are ‘equity adjusted’ and compares their values to those of unadjusted indicators. This comparison shows that countries with the lowest mean happiness scores have their unhappiness compounded when these means are adjusted to take account of the glaring inequality in their inter-personal distribution of happiness. Second, using data on nearly 113 000 respondents, drawn from 80 countries, it shows that people everywhere want broadly the same things in order to be happy: faith in a deity; a decent standard of living; a job; a good family and social life; a good neighbourhood in which to live; and, above all, good health.

Acknowledgement

This study is based on unit record data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study Surveys. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for their interpretation, for the results reported in this paper and, indeed, for any of this paper's deficiencies.

Notes

¹ See Frey and Stutzer (2002) for a comprehensive survey. Country studies include: the USA (Easterlin, 1974; Blanchflower and Oswald, 2000); Great Britain (Oswald, 1997; Blanchflower and Oswald, 2000); Switzerland (Frey and Stutzer, 2002).

² In the United States, the rate of non-response was less than 1% in 14 surveys between 1972 and 1987 (Easterlin, 2001).

³ For example, people who report high happiness scores tend to smile and laugh more and tend to be rated by others as happier (Oswald, 1997).

⁴ It is interesting to note that respondents from Taiwan reported a much higher level of happiness (7.99) compared to respondents from the People's Republic of China (7.17).

⁵ This echoes the method proposed by Anand and Sen (1997), except that they use Atkinson's (1970) index as the inequality measure.

⁶ This point is reinforced by the fourth column of Table 1, which shows the ‘unhappiness rate’ (defined as the proportion of respondents who reported being ‘not at all happy’) for the different countries: six countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and Turkey) had an unhappiness rate of 10% or more.

⁷ For each variable, these probabilities sum to zero across the four happiness outcomes. For discrete variables, the marginal probabilities refer to changes consequent upon a move from the default category for that variable to the category in question.

⁸ The probabilities are taken to range between 0 and 100.

⁹ The probability of a woman being ‘very happy’ was ceteris paribus two points higher than for men (Inglehart, 1990; White, 1992) and the probability of persons to whom religion was important being ‘very happy’ was ceteris paribus 2.1 points higher than for those for whom religion was not so important (Jarvis and Northcott, 1987; Ellison, 1991).

¹⁰ By respectively, 4.8 and 6.5 points. The fact that marriage raises happiness has been found in a large number of studies (see Diener et al., 2000).