Norway has jumped from 4th place in 2016 to 1st place this year which is 2017, followed by Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland in a tightly packed bunch. All of the top four countries rank highly on all the main factors found to support happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance.

All of the other countries in the top ten also have high values in all six of the key variables used to explain happiness differences among countries and through time – income, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on in times of trouble, generosity, freedom and trust, with the latter measured by the absence of corruption in business and government. Here too there has been some shuffling of ranks among closely grouped countries, with this year’s rankings placing Finland in 5thplace, followed by the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia and Sweden tied for the 9th position, having the same 2014-2016 score to three decimals.

life satisfaction

The measure of happiness that was use is life satisfaction. The typical question is “Overall how satisfied are you with your life these days?” measured on a scale of 0 to 10 (from ‘extremely dissatisfied’ to ‘extremely satisfied’). This is a democratic criterion—we do not rely on researchers or policy-makers to give their own weights to enjoyment, meaning, anxiety, depression, and the like. Instead we leave it to individuals to evaluate their own wellbeing. Moreover, policy-makers like the concept—and so they should. Our work shows that in European elections since 1970, the life satisfaction of the people is the best predictor of whether the government is re-elected—much more important than economic growth, unemployment or inflation.

The factors  examine are

• Income: log household income per equivalised adult

• Education: years, except Indonesia (higher education versus none)

• Unemployment: measured as ‘not unemployed’

• Partnership: married, or living as married

• Physical health: USA, Britain and Indonesia: number of illnesses;

• Mental health: USA and Australia: has ever been diagnosed for depression or an anxiety disorder; Britain (BCS): has seen a doctor in the last year for emotional problems

Most earlier analyses of life satisfaction have not included mental health as a factor explaining life satisfaction. The reason is that both life satisfaction and mental health are subjective states, and there is therefore a danger that the two concepts are, at least in part, measuring the same thing. To omit mental health as a factor in the equation, however, is to leave out one of the most potent sources of misery, in addition to standard external causes like poverty, unemployment, and physical illness. The solution is, whenever possible, to record only mental illness that has been diagnosed or has led to treatment. That is our approach and it shows clearly that mental illness not caused by poverty, unemployment or ill health is a potent influence on life satisfaction.

Employment

Happiness is typically defined by how people experience and evaluate their lives as a whole. Since the majority of people spend much of their lives at work, it is critically important to gain a solid understanding of the role that employment and the workplace play in shaping happiness for individuals and communities around the world.

The overwhelming importance of having a job for happiness is evident throughout the analysis, and holds across all of the world’s regions. When considering the world’s population as a whole, people with a job evaluate the quality of their lives much more favorably than those who are unemployed. The importance of having a job extends far beyond the salary attached to it, with non-pecuniary aspects of employment such as social status, social relations, daily structure, and goals all exerting a strong influence on people’s happiness.

The World Happiness Report is mostly concerned with how people experience and evaluate their lives as a whole, rather than domain-specific wellbeing outcomes. The academic literature on the relationship between work and wellbeing, however, has for a long time also considered other measures of wellbeing. The notion of job satisfaction has been widely studied in particular, and more recently the literature has begun to investigate other outcomes such as employee engagement.