Happiness around the Globe

This Webpage highlights the happiness around the world and will explore few factors to find the correlation with the happiness and whether they have been affected over the time. There are interactive charts embedded into this page to help you play and discover more insights by visualizing them. The time span covered in most of the charts are almost a decade.

Let's Get started with a few jokes to make you happy.

What is World Happiness Report?

The World Happiness Report contains data based on the surveys undertaken in more than 156 countries in over 140 language, this data is usually self-reported life satisfaction. This self reported life satisfaction is evaluated by asking a question to imagine a ladder, with 10 steps , each steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder i.e. value 10 represents the best possible life for one self and the bottom of the ladder i.e. the value 0 represents the worst possible life for you. And when answering the survey , on which step of the ladder would they say they personally feel at that time?. This method is also known as the “Cantril Ladder”. There are large variations across countries. According to 2018 figures, countries like Finland, Denmark and Switzerland have the highest scores all with averages above 7.5. In the same year, the national scores for countries like Afghanistan, Yemen, Malawi, Tanzania, and Botswana are the lowest all with average scores below 3.5.

The chart below compares few of the countries in terms of their happiness score. The chart below is an interactive chart. Please use to search box to customize the country selection to compare other countries.

Are there any factors that affect the happiness of a country?

Yes, there are many factors that can affect the countries happiness. This page tries to look at three of those factors and tries to see if there is any correlation between this factors and the Happiness score.

Can most densely populated countries be more happier ?

To understand this , we look at the population density across different countries. Population density is measured by the number of people per square kilometer (km²) across the world. Globally the average population density is 25 people per km², but there are very large variation across different countries. This variation is because of the size of the land mass covered by that country. Many small islands have high population density making them 100 to 1000 times more densely populated than that of large countries. The interactive world map below shows the change in the population density over time.

Among the top 10 happiest countries, countries like Norway, Finland and Sweden have a population density less than 25 people per km². The interesting insight that can be figured out is that country like Netherlands with a happiness score more averaging close to 7.5 has a population density of 504 people per km².

Is happiness Gender biased?

In this section , we are going to see if gender or the sex ratio i.e. the share of the female in a country plays any role in determining the happiness of the country. Globally in 2017 the share of women in the world was 49.6%.

Few reasons why the sex ratio of the countries populations varies and is rarely equal:

• differences in mortality rates

• life expectancy for women and men

• Women, on average, live longer than men. As a result of this , we would expect females to account for slightly more than half of the total population.

• sex ratios at birth are not equal.

• migration also affect the sex ratio of the population. Some countries have a significant amount of male-dominant labour, this can cause males to account for more than half of the total population.

The magnitude and balance of these factors determines the sex ratio of the total population.

In the chart, we see the sex ratio of populations: this is shown as the amount or the percentage of the total population which is female. The chart is simple to read. Countries with values over 50 percent have more females population than males; those below 50 percent have fewer females population than males. Almost 95% of the countries have a female share of the population between 49 and 51 percent.

The notable outliers in this chart are Qatar, Oman, and United Arab Emirates with the least amount of female population followed by Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. When we see the happiness index for the given countries we can significantly see that there are high fluctuations in the happiness index within the range of 6 and 7 over the time and have a very slight negative trend in few of this countries.

Similarly, Countries like Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hong Kong, and Belarus have female ratio closer to 55% of the population. When related with their happiness index shows a very small positive trend in the happiness index over time. This countries even with higher female population tend to have their happiness index within the range of 5 to 6.

Has Happiness developed with Human Development?

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a methodology used by United Nations Development Program (UNDP), it is an index that measures pivotal dimensions of human development. There are three key dimensions considered for a human development. They are as follows:

– A long and healthy life – measured by life expectancy (a statistical measure of the average (see below) time an organism is expected to live, based on the year of its birth, its current age, and other demographic factors including gender ).

– Access to education – measured by expected years of schooling of children at school-entry age and mean years of schooling of the adult population.

– And a decent standard of living – measured by Gross National Income per capita adjusted for the price level of the country.

This provides a basic overview of the standard HDI methodology of the UNDP for the Human Development Index over the last decades. The value used in the process lies between 0 and 1, with 1 being the highest and ) being the lowest.

The chart below shows Human development index for different countries. It is visible that there is very minor changes in the HDI value of a country over a time. But HDI for developing countries can be seen to have a gradual growth over the time. Top five countries that have higher happiness index have their HDI values in the range of 0.9 - 0.95. As said earlier , higher the HDI value the better. Similarly, when we check the HDI values for the countries with least happiness index, they tend to have lower HDI value with most of the values over the time lying below 0.5. But with the development over the time, we can definitely see that all these countries are developing and are showing a positive trend in their HDI values over the time.