International Happiness

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES

INTERNATIONAL HAPPINESS David G. Blanchflower Andrew J. Oswald Working Paper 16668 http://www.nber.org/papers/w16668

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 January 2011

For suggestions and valuable discussions, we thank Gordon D.A. Brown, Rafael Di Tella, Amanda Goodall, Robert MacCulloch, Nick Powdthavee, EugenioProto, Daniel Sgroi, and Steve Wu. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2011 by David G.Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.

International Happiness David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald NBER Working Paper No. 16668 January 2011 JEL No. I1,I3 ABSTRACT This paper describes the findings from anew, and intrinsically interdisciplinary, literature on happiness and human well-being. The paper focuses on international evidence. We report the patterns in modern data; we discuss what has been persuasively established and what has not; we suggest paths for future research. Looking ahead, our instinct is that this social-science research avenue will gradually merge with a related literature --from the medical, epidemiological, and biological sciences -- on biomarkers and health. Nevertheless, we expect that intellectual convergence to happen slowly.

David G. Blanchflower Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Economics 6106 Rockefeller Hall Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 03755-3514 and NBER David.G.Blanchflower@Dartmouth.EDU Andrew J. Oswald Department of Economics University of Warwick CoventryCV4 7AL England a.j.oswald@warwick.ac.uk

International Happiness David G. Blanchflower Andrew J. Oswald
“Measures of both objective and subjective well-being provide key information about people’s quality of life. Statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture people’s life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities ...”
Stiglitz et al, Commission on the Measurement ofEconomic Performance and Social Progress, 2009.

1. Introduction Standard indices of a country’s prosperity -- such as longevity, human height, the incidence of disease, the suicide rate, and the level of Gross Domestic Product -- are well-known and widely collected. Governments throughout the developed nations, and in many developing nations, regularly publish such numbers. Yet if they are to dotheir job effectively, politicians and

policy-makers arguably have to go beyond this. They have to try to understand, and measure, the happiness and mental health of their country’s citizens. The reason is that it is overall human well-being (not simply a collection of its constituent elements) that is ultimately of interest. The last few decades have seen a body of researchers attempt to riseto the difficult challenge of how to study ‘happiness’ in a systematic, empirical way. These scholars come from a range of disciplines -- including psychology, economics, epidemiology, medicine, statistics, sociology, political science, and management science. Although their methodological

approaches differ in detail (moreover, researchers in one discipline are not always good at citing relatedwork in the journals of the other disciplines, so different sub-fields sometimes lay claim to having discovered results first), a common methodology has begun to emerge. This article describes the core findings from the new ‘happiness’ literature.1 One

approach for a paper of this kind would be to go through in the manner of a survey article --

Contributions from psychologists, economists,...