World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report is a publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It contains articles and rankings of national happiness, based on respondent ratings of their own lives, which the report also correlates with various (quality of) life factors. As of March 2021, Finland was ranked the happiest country in the world four times in a row.

The report primarily uses data from the Gallup World Poll. Each annual report is available to the public to download on the World Happiness Report website. The Editors of the 2020 report are John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve. Associate Editors are Lara Aknin, Shun Wang, and Haifang Huang.

History

In July 2011, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 65/309 Happiness: Towards a Holistic Definition of Development inviting member countries to measure the happiness of their people and to use the data to help guide public policy. On April 2, 2012, this was followed by the first UN High Level Meeting called Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm, which was chaired by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley of Bhutan, a nation that adopted gross national happiness instead of gross domestic product as their main development indicator.

The first World Happiness Report was released on April 1, 2012 as a foundational text for the UN High Level Meeting: Well-being and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm, drawing international attention. The first report outlined the state of world happiness, causes of happiness and misery, and policy implications highlighted by case studies. In 2013, the second World Happiness Report was issued, and in 2015 the third. Since 2016, it has been issued on an annual basis on the 20th of March, to coincide with the UN’s International Day of Happiness.

Methods and philosophy

The rankings of national happiness are based on a Cantril ladder survey. Nationally representative samples of respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale. The report correlates the life evaluation results with various life factors.

The life factor variables used in the reports are reflective of determinants that explain national-level differences in life evaluations across research literature. However, certain variables, such as unemployment or inequality, are not considered as comparable data is not yet available across all countries. The variables used illustrate important correlations rather than causal estimates.

The use of subjective measurements of wellbeing is meant to be a bottom-up approach which emancipates respondents to evaluate their own wellbeing. In this context, the value of the Cantril Ladder is the fact that a respondent can self-anchor themselves based on their perspective.

In the reports, experts in fields including economics, psychology, survey analysis, and national statistics, describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations, and other topics. Each report is organized by chapters that delve deeper into issues relating to happiness, including mental illness, the objective benefits of happiness, the importance of ethics, policy implications, and links with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) approach to measuring subjective well-being and other international and national efforts.

WELLBYs

From 2021 the World Happiness Report has advocated for the use of WELLBYs (Well-Being-Adjusted Life-Years); it argues that QALYs only count the individual patient’s health-related quality of life, and instead WELLBYs should be used. Policy-makers should aim to maximise the WELLBYs of all who are born, and also include the WELLBYs of future generations (subject to a small discount rate).

Annual report topics

World Happiness Reports were issued in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016 (an update), 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. In addition to ranking countries happiness and well-being levels, each report has contributing authors and most focus on a particular theme. The data used to rank countries in each report is drawn from the Gallup World Poll, as well as other sources such as the World Values Survey, in some of the reports. The Gallup World Poll questionnaire measures 14 areas within its core questions: (1) business & economic, (2) citizen engagement, (3) communications & technology, (4) diversity (social issues), (5) education & families, (6) emotions (well-being), (7) environment & energy, (8) food & shelter, (9) government and politics, (10) law & order (safety), (11) health, (12) religion & ethics, (13) transportation, and (14) work.

2020 World Happiness Report

2019 World Happiness Report

2018 World Happiness Report

2017 World Happiness Report

2016 World Happiness Report

2015 World Happiness Report

2013 World Happiness Report

2012 World Happiness Report

International rankings

Data is collected from people in over 150 countries. Each variable measured reveals a populated-weighted average score on a scale running from 0 to 10 that is tracked over time and compared against other countries. These variables currently include:

• real GDP per capita
• social support
• healthy life expectancy
• freedom to make life choices
• generosity
• perceptions of corruption

Each country is also compared against a hypothetical nation called Dystopia. Dystopia represents the lowest national averages for each key variable and is, along with residual error, used as a regression benchmark. The six metrics are used to explain the estimated extent to which each of these factors contribute to increasing life satisfaction when compared to the hypothetical nation of Dystopia, but they themselves do not have an impact on the total score reported for each country.

2020 report

The 2020 report features the happiness score averaged over the years 2017–2019. Finland is the happiest country in the world, followed by Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway. The data comes from the Gallup World Poll, based entirely on survey scores and answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the poll.

2019 report

The 2019 report features the happiness score averaged over the years 2016–2018. As per the 2019 Happiness Index, Finland is the happiest country in the world. Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Netherlands hold the next top positions. The report was published on 20 March 2019 by UN. The full report can be read at 2019 Report. The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness.

2018 report

The 2018 report features the happiness score averaged over the years 2015–2017. As per the 2018 Happiness Index, Finland is the happiest country in the world. Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland hold the next top positions. The report was published on 14 March 2018 by UN. The full report can be read at 2018 Report. The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness. The World Happiness Report 2018, which ranks 156 countries by their happiness levels, and 117 countries by the happiness of their immigrants, was released on March 14 at a launch event at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican.

2017 report

The 2017 report features the happiness score averaged over the years 2014–2016. For that timespan, Norway was the overall happiest country in the world, even though oil prices had dropped. Close behind were Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland in a tight pack. Four of the top five countries follow the Nordic model. All the top ten countries had high scores in the six categories. The ranked follow-on countries in the top ten are: Finland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Sweden.

2016 report

Criticism

Metrics

Critics have pointed out the difference between evaluations and experiences of wellbeing.  For instance Colombia came 37th in the 2018 World Happiness Report rankings but first by daily emotional experience in Gallup’s Positive Experience Index. The inconsistencies in the results of different happiness measurement surveys have also been noted, for instance, a Pew survey of 43 countries in 2014 (which excluded most of Europe) had Mexico, Israel and Venezuela finishing first, second and third. Others point out that the variables of interest used by the World Happiness Report are more appropriate for measuring national-level rather than individual-level happiness.

Methodology

The World Happiness Report’s use of a single item indicator measure of subjective well-being is fundamentally different from more traditional Index approaches which use a range of indicators such as the United Nation’s Human Development Index, the OECD Better Life Index of 2011, or the Social Progress Index of 2013. There has also been an on-going debate regarding single-item and multi-item scales as measures of life satisfaction.

The idea that subjective well-being can be captured by a survey has also been contested by economists, who have, identified that people’s assessments of their happiness can be affected by the way in which, for example, their country’s education system grades exams, and that survey questions on subjective wellbeing are affected by response styles.