World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report is a measure of happiness published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

In July 2011, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution inviting member countries to measure the happiness of their people and to use this to help guide their public policies. On April 2, 2012, this was followed by the first UN High Level Meeting on "Happiness and Well-Being: Defining a New Economic Paradigm," which was chaired by Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of Bhutan, the first and so far only country to have officially adopted gross national happiness instead of gross domestic product as their main development indicator.

The first World Happiness Report was released on April 1, 2012 as a foundational text for the meeting. It drew international attention as the world's first global happiness survey. The report outlined the state of world happiness, causes of happiness and misery, and policy implications highlighted by case studies. In September 2013 the second World Happiness Report offered the first annual follow-up and reports are now issued every year. The report uses data from the Gallup World Poll. Each annual report is available to the public on the World Happiness Report website.

In the reports, leading experts in several fields--economics, psychology, survey analysis, national statistics, and more—describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations. Each report is organized by chapters that delve deeper into issues relating to happiness, including mental illness, the objective benefits of happiness, the importance of ethics, policy implications, and links with the OECD's approach to measuring subjective well-being and the Human Development Report.

Data is collected from people in over 150 countries. Each variable measured reveals a populated-weighted average score on a scale running from 0 to 10 that is tracked over time and compared against other countries. These variables currently include: real GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption. Each country is also compared against a hypothetical nation called Dystopia. Dystopia represents the lowest national averages for each key variable and is, along with residual error, used as a regression benchmark.

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