Australia: One of the Happiest Countries in the World?
Given that cross-national comparisons of subjective wellbeing are quite noisy, it
seems important to assess not only whether one country is happier than another, but also
whether that difference is statistically significant and to check our conclusions across
various datasets. As such, we ran ordered logit regressions using the microdata from the
11
World Values Surveys, with country fixed effects as the only controls. (While
Blanchflower and Oswald also control for demographics and marriage- and labourmarket
outcomes, it is not clear to us why one would want to control for economic and
social outcomes when contrasting a nation’s wellbeing with her level of development. As
it happens, such controls did not much affect our results, although it is plausible that a
richer set of conditioning variables might have a larger impact.)