What Makes a Country Happy? | Analyzing the 2021 World Happiness Report
Introduction.
The summer after my freshman year, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Guatemala for a service trip with Engineers Without Borders. In those two weeks, I was pushed outside of my comfort zone in terms of experiencing the langauge barrier, adjusting to the new living environment, and lacking access to Internet. The experience challenged many of my preconceptions of what it means to be happy and what is needed to be happy. I realized that happiness can be really simple and the people I’ve met there are among the happiest I’ve ever met. This serves as my personal motivation to explore what factors contribute to happiness on a global level and whether access to internet correlates to happiness in any way.
Setting the Scene.
We will be using two datasets for our exploration, both collected from Kaggle. The first consists of data from the world happiness report of 2021 and past years from 2020–2005. The happiness scores and rankings use data from the Gallup World Poll, with information on the logged Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, social support, life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption. The second consists of data from GapMinder which collects data from a handful of sources, including the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the US Census Bureau’s International Database, the United Nations Statistics Division, and the World Bank. Each country in this dataset has information on income per person, which is the same as the GDP per capita, internet use rate, which are the number of people with access to the worldwide network (per 100 people), and urban rate, which refers to percentage of people living in urban areas.
Let’s analyze data on the world happiness report and global internet usage to answer the following questions:
- What are the happiest countries in the world?
- What factors affect this happiness score?
- Which countries have the highest number of internet users?
- How is access to internet and happiness related?
Through gaining insights on the above four questions, we can then discuss what changes countries can implement to make their people happier.
World Happiness Report Analysis.
Let’s begin by looking at the big picture of how happiness is distributed on a global and regional level.
We can see from the world map and the chart that North America, Europe and Australia are among the top regions ranked by happiness.
Now, let’s zoom in and look at the top 10 happiest countries of 2021.
From the chart, we gather that Finland is the happiest country in 2021. The measure for happiness is determined by the so-called ladder score, which is primarily based on levels of GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom, and corruption (more details in the caption above).
As we can see Finland not only tops in 2021, but has been the leading country in terms of happiness for the past three years. What makes Finland have the highest happiness score? We also found Afghanistan to have the lowest happiness score in 2021. Let’s see where Finland and Afghanistan fall in terms of the factors that contribute to the ladder score, beginning with GDP. Does money actually equal happiness?
In terms of the GDP per capita, Finland certainly falls on the upper end of the spectrum, however we can see that Finland is not necessary the richest country and nor is Afghanistan the poorest country. From this, we find that money does not perfectly correlate with happiness. On the other hand, social support seems to be a better indicator for happiness in that we can see people in Afghanistan feel no social support at all compared to people in Finland where they feel nearly a max amount of social support. This tells us that feeling a strong sense of community and having a support network to fall back on makes people happy.
From the charts above we can see that in general high healthy life expectancy and high freedom to make life choices correlates positively to happiness score.
Generosity on the other hand, does not seem to impact the happiness score much as we see a nearly identical generosity score for Finland and Afghanistan, showing that people in both of these countries are not considered to be very generous. Perception of corruption also seems to be a good indicator of happiness with the happiest country appearing much lower on the perception of corruption scale and the unhappiest country on the opposite end.
Overall, we see in the correlation matrix and from our graphs above that countries with high GDP, high social support, high life expectancy, high freedom, and low perception of corruption tend to be happier.
Now, let’s switch gears and analyze data on global internet usage and see if there are any relations with the happiness score.
Global Internet Usage Analysis.
From the world map, we can see some overlap in the regions that experience the highest happiness scores and regions that have high internet use rates, namely, North America, Europe, and Australia among others.
From the chart we see that Finland, the happiest country in the world is not necessarily the country with the highest internet use rate, although it does appear in the top 10. Note that there are lots of overlap in terms of the top 10 internet usage countries and the top 10 happiest countries. Now let’s compare internet use rate against the ladder score as well as urban rate and income per person.
From the first graph we see that the internet use rate and the ladder score are positively correlated more strongly than urban rate and internet use rate. Income per person and internet use rate also seems to be positively correlated with a skewed set of data points.
Overall, internet use rate, urban rate, and income per person, all have a strong correlation with the ladder score.
Methodology.
I gathered data from Kaggle and then used R studio to create the visualizations with R. Lastly, I put everything together into this post with Medium.
Closing (for now).
What a journey. Through this anaylsis, we learned that the countries with the highest happiness scores in general have higher GDPs, higher social support, higher life expectancy, higher freedom to make life choices, and lower perceptions of corruption. This tells us that in order to make their people happy, countries should adapt their policies and implement changes to work towards these goals. In addition we found through exploring the global internet usage dataset, that the happiest countries overlap with the countries with high access to internet.
While we were able to gain insights how what contributes to a country’s happiness score, there are many limitations to consider. I initially set forth to see whether access to internet affects happiness in any way, however as I proceeded in my exploration I realized that this may not have been the best factor to look into. Instead, looking into how the amount of time spent on the Internet affects happiness may give us more interesting insights since I realized that access to Internet had many underlying factors relating to how developed a country is and did not necessarily measure the effect spending time on the Internet had on happiness.
In addition, it is important to note that everyone has there own definitions of happiness and that the dataset used was based on a certain definition of happiness which has limitations in and of itself.
Next, it would be interesting to dig deeper into each factor such as exploring how the happiest countries deal with the coronavirus pandemic, healthcare policies, mental health support and awareness, gender equality, climate change, among other pressing issues to glean insights on policy changes that can be adopted by other countries to improve the happiness and quality of living for the people living there.
About the Author.
Joey Zhao is a junior at the University of Pennsylvania. This data project was conducted for Prasanna Tambe’s course, OIDD245: Analytics & The Digital Economy.
