Using the WVS, the largest cross-national survey that includes questions on both
happiness and life satisfaction, we found that Australia ranked 12th out of 77 countries
for happiness, and 19th out of 78 for life satisfaction. Ordered logits show that some of
these differences are not statistically significant. In this survey, only one country
(Iceland) beat Australia by a significant margin for both happiness and life satisfaction.
This should come as no surprise: across cross-national surveys conducted from the 1940s
to the 1980s, Australians have consistently ranked themselves highly on measures of
subjective wellbeing.