HappinessIndex: World Happiness Report Data
In DataComputing/DataComputing: Functions and Data for the Data Computing book

Description Usage Format Details Source Examples

The United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network releases a report giving several indices of "happiness" measured for each of more than 150 countries. These data are from the 2013 report (http://unsdsn.org/resources/publications/world-happiness-report-2013/). Underlying the data are the results of Gallop World Polls — the country data is presumably the aggregate of data from individual people, although how the aggregate is made is uncertain to this writer.

1	data("HappinessIndex")

A data frame with 156 observations on the following 13 variables.

country: name of the country
region: numerical code for a region of the world
score: The happiness index: a number from 0 to 10
socialSupport: A measure of having someone to count on
freedom: Perceived freedom to make life choices
corruption: Freedom from corruption
donation
generosity: The generosity of people
affectPos
affectNeg
happinessYesterday: A presumably subjective measure of how happy the poll respondants were the day before the poll.
gdpPerCapita: In dollars
lifeExpectancy: The "healthy life expectancy" in years.

The healthy life expectancy (HALE) is a World Health Organization measure of how long, on average, a person can be expected to live in good health.

The data were scraped from a PDF file released by the United Nations. A few country names were changed to match those in CountryData. (Example: Myanmar -> Burma) Not all of the HappinessIndex countries are in CountryData, and vice versa.

The World Happiness Report is at http://unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/WorldHappinessReport2013_online.pdf. The original data used to create HappinessIndex are at http://unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Chapter-2_online-appendix_9-5-13_final.pdf.