Posted on 22 March 2022
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the World Happiness Report, which uses global survey data to report on how people evaluate their own lives in more than 150 countries around the world.
Jeffrey Sachs, one of the report’s authors, explains its origin and purpose: "A decade ago, governments around the world expressed the desire to put happiness at the heart of the global development agenda… And the lesson of the World Happiness Report over the years is that social support, generosity to one another, and honesty in government are crucial for well-being. World leaders should take heed. Politics should be directed as the great sages long ago insisted: to the well-being of the people, not the power of the rulers."
If you look at the rankings, there is a stark global happiness divide, with the top 10 countries all from the 'Global North' and the bottom 10 from the 'Global South'. A colonial lens may be useful in understanding why this is, and the measure itself may be centred in a 'western' understanding of happiness.
Disappointingly, Pacific Island nations do not feature in the ranking at all. A Dev Policy blog from 2019 raised this issue, finding that the WHR doesn’t collect data for nations with populations under 1 million. Which, as the blog points out, doesn’t add up. Nations such as Iceland (population 366,000 and ranked 3 this year) are included, and Papua New Guinea (population 8.9 million) is not.
The report gives some interesting insight and raises important themes around public trust and social safety nets. However, issues of cultural bias and access and availability to data across the world, means we should be cautious to draw meaningful conclusions and comparisons. But the effort to measure countries by the wellbeing of their people is a focus worth pursuing.