Macroeconomic, governance and environmental factors on happiness: A cross country analysis

Abstract

The Happiness Index is extensive survey instrument that measures happiness from different areas of a person’s life which is also known as comprehensive measure of wellbeing. In another words, it generally indicates the satisfaction level and happiness of different countries. This research study was conducted to analyze the relationship among the World Happiness Index (WHI) and four selected variables including inflation (INF), corruption (COR), employment (EMP), air pollution(AIP). A comprehensive dataset comprising information from 218 countries was largely collected from the world happiness report and world bank database. The dataset spans from 2012 to 2019. The data that the author collected were in different forms. For this reason, the dataset has to be changed in the standardized from to do the analysis. In this research, the author utilized the correlational method to see the relationship among the five variables where two statistics software have been used (IBM SPSS and gretl). These test were utilized to establish significant relationships among the identified variables using a 5% level of significance. By analyzing the result, the author has concluded that there is a weak negative relationship between inflation and the WHI, a weak positive relationship between corruption and the WHI, a moderate positive relationship between employment and the WHI, and a weak negative relationship between air pollution and the WHI. In conclusion, the study claimed that, “the subjective well-being or Happiness” depends on the performance of countries based on the given socio-economic and environmental factors like inflation, corruption, employment, and air pollution.