*~ Reference ~* Happiness score or subjective well-being (variable name ladder). The English wording of the question is “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder epresents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would uyou say you personally feel you stand at this time?” This measure is also referred to as Cantril life ladder, or just life ladder in our analysis.
The statistics of GDP per capita (variable name gdp) in purchasing power parity (PPP) at constant 2017 international dollar prices are from the December 16, 2021 update of the World Development Indicators (WDI).
Social support (or having someone to count on in times of trouble) is the national average of the binary responses (either 0 or 1) to the GWP question “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?”
Freedom to make life choices is the national average of responses to the GWP question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”
Generosity is the residual of regressing national average of response to the GWP question “Have you donated money to a charity in the past month?” on GDP per capita.
Corruption Perception: The measure is the national average of the survey responses to two questions in the GWP: “Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not” and “Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?” The overall perception is just the average of the two 0-or-1 responses. In case the perception of government corruption is missing, we use the perception of business corruption as the overall perception. The corruption perception at the national level is just the average response of the overall perception at the individual level.
Positive affect is defined as the average of three positive affect measures in GWP: laugh, enjoyment and doing interesting things in the Gallup World Poll waves 3-7. These measures are the responses to the following three questions, respectively: “Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?”, and “Did you experience the following feelings during A LOT OF THE DAY yesterday? How about Enjoyment?”, “Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday?”
Negative affect is defined as the average of three negative affect measures in GWP. They are worry, sadness and anger, respectively the responses to “Did you experience the following feelings during A LOT OF THE DAY yesterday? How about Worry?”, “Did you experience the following feelings during A LOT OF THE DAY yesterday? How about Sadness?”, and “Did you experience the following feelings during A LOT OF THE DAY yesterday? How about Anger?”
Employment rates are defined as a measure of the extent to which available labour resources (people available to work) are being used. They are calculated as the ratio of the employed to the working age population.
This indicator looks at adult education level as defined by the highest level of education completed by the 25-64 year-old population.
Inflation measured by consumer price index (CPI) is defined as the change in the prices of a basket of goods and services that are typically purchased by specific groups of households. Inflation is measured in terms of the annual growth rate and in index. Inflation measures the erosion of living standards.
The price to income and price to rent ratios are indices with base year 2015.
The poverty rate is the ratio of the number of people (in a given age group) whose income falls below the poverty line; taken as half the median household income of the total population.
Self-employment is defined as the employment of employers, workers who work for themselves, members of producers' co-operatives, and unpaid family workers.
Trust in government refers to the share of people who report having confidence in the national government. The data shown reflect the share of respondents answering “yes” (the other response categories being “no”, and “don’t know”) to the survey question: “In this country, do you have confidence in… national government?
The youth unemployment rate is the number of unemployed 15-24 year-olds expressed as a percentage of the youth labour force.
This indicator adopts the European Union agreed definition of overcrowding, which takes into account different needs for living space according to the age and gender composition of the household. A household is considered as living in overcrowded conditions if less than one room is available in each household
Internet access is defined as the percentage of households who reported that they had access to the Internet.
Access to computers from home is defined as the number of households that reported having at least one personal computer in working order in their home. This indicator is measured in percentage of all households.
This indicator measures the proportion of previous in-work household income maintained after 2, 6, 12, 24 and 60 months of unemployment. Calculations refer to a single person without children whose previous in-work earnings were 67% of the average wage.
Average wages are obtained by dividing the national-accounts-based total wage bill by the average number of employees in the total economy, which is then multiplied by the ratio of the average usual weekly hours per full-time employee to the average usually weekly hours for all employees.
Health spending measures the final consumption of health care goods and services. This indicator is presented as a total and by type of financing (“Government/compulsory”, “Voluntary”, “Out-of-pocket”) and is measured as a share of GDP, as a share of total health spending and in USD per capita.
Binary measure indicating overally happy country in a specific year or mediocre/unhappy country. Happy is considred above 6.0. This is to ensure that a country is happy with bigger confidence as the median 5.0 could be very likely the outcome of perfectly balanced positive and negative responses that even themselves out to the exact median.