Happiness: Evidence from World Happiness Report

“Happiness is…

… taking control of your happiness”

The World Happiness Report is a publication that contains articles and rankings of national happiness, based on respondent ratings of their own lives. These reports are published every year. These reports explore the factors contributing to human wellbeing, the happiness ratings of countries and the importance of measuring happiness.

Let us look at some insights that we can derive from the World Happiness Report (published in 2024 and 2025). I am not interested to talk about which country is happier, and which country is less happy. Rather, we want to look at some trends about happiness. What is it that drives happiness of individuals? What is it that drives happiness of countries when we look at the World Happiness Report? 

The World Happiness Reports defines subjective well-being as a mix of life evaluation, positive affect (positive emotions) as well as negative affect (negative emotions).

Life evaluation is defined as a respondent’s evaluation of current life as a whole. Imagine a ladder with 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. A respondent is asked: how high are you on the ladder for on a scale of 0 to 10 (where are you on the ladder)? Typically, 1000 responses from every country annually are collected and happiness rankings are based on 3-year average of these life evaluations.

Positive emotions are measured as the average of individuals response as a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on 3 emotions: laughter, enjoyment and interest.

Negative emotions again are measured as an average of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ on 3 emotions: worry, sadness and anger.

Let me show you and talk about some trends that we observe from the World Happiness Report. 

Positive Affect

Interestingly, results from research show that positive affect is influenced by social support. Do you have people around you? Do you have relationships on which you can bank? The second factor is freedom to make choices: freedom to decide what you want to do/pursue in your life. And the third factor is generosity. Generosity is measured in the research as ‘do I donate to organizations, charities, etc.’

So, the research or the trends from the World Happiness Report tells us that people who engage in these 3 things: they have social support, they are generous and they have freedom to make life choices experience positive emotions. 

 Negative Affect

On the other side, negative emotions are said to be lower for people who have social support and who have freedom to make life choices.

Life Evaluation

The third factor - life evaluation - is based on country GDP. We find from evidence that people belonging to countries having higher GDP are happier. So, if you are born in a developing or underdeveloped country, you are starting off with a handicap when it comes to happiness.

However, the good news is that our life evaluations also depend on individual-level variables. Social support again, people who have social support, people who have relationships around are people who have positive life emotions, life evaluations, they have better life evaluations of themselves. Our life evaluations depend on social support, freedom to make life choices and positive affect.

The people who have freedom to make life choices, who have positive affect and have social support are likely to be happiness and have higher life evaluations.

The evidence from research is clear. It is very important focus on our positive emotions as positive emotions are linked to higher life evaluations. So, if you are able to control your emotions and experience positive emotions, you may be happy. The importance of positive emotions therefore cannot be emphasized enough.

Also, look at your social environment. Your relationships at home, and in office are going to be important. Last, do you have freedom to make life choices and decide what you want to do (or become)? Of course, generosity is also related to positive emotions and so it does, indirectly, support life evaluations.

Variable definitions:

Social support: average of the yes or the no response to: do you have people around you, do you have relatives or friends who can help you?

Freedom to make life choices: Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the freedom that you have to do things in your life?

Generosity: Have you made donations to charity in the past month?

Perceptions of corruption: How corrupt do you think or do you see your government to be?

Positive affect: measure of laughter, enjoyment and doing interesting things. On an average, how much how frequently did you experience these 3 aspects in your previous day.

Negative affect: measure of worry, sadness and anger. How much did you experience these 3 emotions in your previous day.