World Happiness Report 2013
Figure 2.2 shows that there are large inter-regional differences in average ladder scores, which range from 4.6 to over 7.1. The explanations, as revealed by the width of the individual bars, show that all factors contribute to the explanation, but the amounts explained by each factor differ by region. For example, while Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest average ladder score, corruption is seen as a smaller problem there than in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Central and Eastern Europe, and South-East Asia. Similarly, a higher fraction of respondents have someone to count on in Sub-Saharan Africa than in either South Asia or the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Generosity, even before adjusting for income differences, is higher in Sub-Saharan Africa than in three regions— the CIS, East Asia, and MENA. After adjusting for income differences, Sub-Saharan generosity is also higher than in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Central and Eastern Europe. And the sense of freedom to make key life decisions is higher in Sub-Saharan Africa than in either the CIS or MENA. In fact, only for the two traditional development measures — GDP per capita and years of healthy life expectancy — are the average values lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, as might be expected, each region contains a wide variety of individual and country experiences. Having now illustrated how our explanatory framework operates, we turn in the next section to use it to explain the much greater differences that appear at the national level.
National Happiness Levels and Explanations In this section, we first present in Figure 2.3 the 2010 –12 national averages for life evaluations, with each country’s average score divided into seven pieces.25 The overall ladder rankings differ from those in Figure 2.3 of the first World Happiness Report. First, they include more up-todate data, with the ending point of the new data coverage moving forward from mid-2011 to the
end of 2012. Second, in last year’s report we averaged all available data, running from 2005 until mid-2011, while this year we present averages for the three years 2010-12, giving a sample size of 3,000 for most countries.26 We focus on the more recent data for two reasons. First, we expect that readers want the data presented in our key tables to be as current as possible, consistent with having sample sizes large enough to avoid too many ranking changes due to sampling fluctuations. Second, we want to be able to look for changes through time in the average happiness levels for countries, regions, and the world as a whole. The three panels of Figure 2.3 divide the 156 countries into three groups. The top five countries are Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Sweden, and the bottom five are Rwanda, Burundi, Central African Republic, Benin, and Togo. The gap between the top and the bottom is quite large: the average Cantril ladder in the top five countries is 7.48, which is over 2.5 times the 2.94 average ladder in the bottom countries. As was the case in the first World Happiness Report, there are no countries with populations over 50 million among the 10 top-ranking countries. Does this mean that it is harder for larger countries to create conditions supporting happier lives? A closer look at the data shows no evidence of this sort. There are two large countries in the top 20 countries, and none among the bottom 20. The 24 countries with populations over 50 million tend not to be at either end of the global distribution, in part because they each represent averages among many differing sub-national regions. Looking at the three parts of Figure 2.3, there are eight large countries in the top third, and five in the bottom third, with the other 11 in the middle group. There is no simple correlation between average ladder scores and country size, although if we look at the part of life evaluations not explained by the six key variables, ladder scores are if anything higher in larger countries.27
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