Happiness is measured by asking individuals about their perception about being happy using different scales. This is, therefore, the way to measure welfare on the individual level and the aggregation takes place by adding the scores to an average score when trying to compare between countries. “General happiness is the measure of subjective well-being examined most frequently”
(Yang 2008, 204). Happiness will, therefore, be used as one of the proxies for welfare at the micro level. We will discuss this in Section 3.