What Makes People Happy?

Comparison of Happiness Score across regions of world in 2021:

In order to do further analysis, a regional analysis of happiness scores is essential.

From the chart it can be seen that the Western Europe has the Highest average Happiness Score, on the other hand Sub Saharan Africa has the lowest average Happiness Score. A combination of several factors may have caused this disparity in happiness levels.

In order to understand this trend, it is necessary to see which factors are contributing to Happiness Scores in these two regions.

There is a clear difference in the GDP per person of these countries. We can observe that richer and economically well-off regions are happier. The same is the case for healthy life expectancy. Generally Western Europe is performing better in all factors, corruption in Sub Saharan African countries is hindering political, economic and social development and hence effects the growth. However, we need to ask are these variables enough to assess the happiness score alone, or can other factors explain happiness across the Globe?

Suicide Rates and Happiness:

Suicide rates, in themselves, are an indispensable tool to measure happiness across all countries. A person who commits suicide, in most cases, is driven by a feeling of intense and acute misery and helplessness; they are overwhelmed by emotions of regret, desperation, and sorrow and see no other way out and no point in living anymore. All these are highly strong negative emotions that drive a person towards suicide. Hence, consequently, it can be assumed that the higher the suicide rates of a country, the lower its happiness rates should be. However, as we see in the following chart, this is not the case.

Interestingly, those countries which ranked the highest in the World Happiness Report for 2016 also have a high suicide level. Countries like Denmark and Finland with the highest scores in happiness (7.4 and 7.53 respectively)also have high scores in suicide levels (15.2 and 10.9 respectively) while countries like Afghanistan, a country ravaged with war, poverty, and destitution for the past 30 years and consequently with a low happiness score, has a comparatively low suicide score.

In order to study it further, we made some scatters plots to see the correlation between these two variables across various continents and to draw further insights from them.

In western Europe, we can observe that there exists a strong positive correlation between Happiness scores and Suicide rates. On the other hand, in Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a positive correlation too, showing that there are increasing suicide levels with happiness scores but to a lesser extent. Why do happier countries record such high levels of suicide?

As happiness is a subjective experience, each person experiences it differently. In happy countries with high suicide levels, it may be that the people who responded in those countries reported higher life satisfaction even when they are unhappy. There can be a disparity between a person's own perception of their happiness levels versus their actual happiness levels.

Another reason why the suicide rate is lower in poor rather than in rich countries may be that in developing countries, people's primary pursuit may be to improve their lifestyle. Their day-to-day struggles revolve around improving their standard of living and hence people have some cause to work towards and stay alive for. However, in developed countries such as the Scandinavian countries. their basic necessities such as health and education facilities as well as good housing etc is already provided by the state. People may not have much to work for which may lead to a feeling of loss of meaning. These people do not need money for happiness, which might lead to su

However, it could also be the case that in poor and underdeveloped countries that are war-or poverty-stricken, data for suicide rate is simply underreported because of which, their values of suicide rates may be higher than they are in the data.