By Jaime Díez MedranoDirector of the WVS Archive and ASEP/JDS
Note of the author: What follows are weighted sample percentages, when the weight was provided. Data must be treated with care, since the sample distributions by education and other socio-demographic variables in some countries, may diverge substantially from their respective population distributions.
The world population is quite happy in general, despite the crisis, the environmental problems or the illness. This is what can be derived from the great majority of studies carried in many regions for the last ten years.
Only some very specific regions can be considered 'unhappy', such as the axis formed in Latin-America by Ecuador-Peru-Bolivia, or the Caucassian-Balkans region of Eastern Europe, the Iraq region in Asia, or the Great Lakes region of Africa (Zambia, Zimbabwe). The rest of the surveyed world has a majority of persons that consider themselves as very happy or quite happy.
Among the countries with highest rates of respondents that consider themselves very happy are Nigeria (66.8%), Tanzania (56.2%) and Puerto Rico (53.3%), eventhought the data for these three countries is not too recent (2000-2001). They are followed by Trinidad & Tobago, Ghana, Ireland and South Africa which have rates of about 50% and whose data are more recent (2006-2007). Spain would be in the 80th position of the ranking, while the US is in the 20th position. These figures can better be observed in Graphic 1.
In the opposite pole, the ranking of those declaring themselves 'Not at all happy' is leaded by Iraq, Moldova, Albania, Bulgaria and Zimbabwe, all of them with rates over 9%. The complete ranking can be seen in figure 2.
Anyhow, the level of happiness is better measured using the 'Happiness Index' that is defined as the rate of those declaring themselves as 'Very happy' or 'Quite happy' less the rate of those declaring themselves as 'Not very happy' or 'Not at all happy', plus 100. This index ranges from 0 to 200, in such a way that the happiest countries will tend to 200 and the less happy countries to 0. 100 is the mid-point value or equilibrium point, and countries with indexes around 100 have a similar rate of persons quite or very happy and persons not very or not at all happy.
The usefulness of the Happiness index relies in that it allows to compensate the effect of inequalities in some countries were a high rate of people feel very happy and another important proportion feels just the opposite. The ranking in figure 3 shows that Tanzania or Nigeria are downgraded to lower positions. The happiest countries are, according to this index, Iceland (note, with data from 1999), Norway, Ireland, Canada, Singapore (this last with 2002 data) and Malaysia, all of them with values over 190.
On the opposite side are Bolivia, Peru, Moldova, Iraq and Ecuador, all of them with values under 110. A salient fact is that Bolivia is the only country in this ranking with an index value under the equilibrium value of 100. In other words, Bolivia is the only country where not very or not at all happy respondents are more numerous than quite happy or very happy respondents.
With the help of the index we can build a map of the world happiness that is shown in figure 4. More detailed maps for different world regions are displayed in the maps that follow (note you can move the cursor over countries to see the index values and country name).
To build the rankings and maps of this document we have used ASEP/JDS databank ( www.jdsurvey.net), which includes collections with a temporal scope of more than 20 years and with a very wide geographical scope covering almost 50% of the world countries (which represents more than 90% of the total world population). The majority of studies of international scope include in some year a question about respondent's happiness. It is an almost standard question whose wording is generally like this:
To build the index we have used the following sources of information:
We have selected for each country the most recent data, with a limit of 1999 in order to exclude too old sources.
WORLD MAP OF HAPPINESS
(Click over the map to enlarge)
What follows is a series of detailed maps for different continents or regions of the world:
RANKING OF COUNTRIES