Exploring Happiness data centre

The data we focus on at Exploring Happiness allows us to track and better understand how countries are progressing in a number of different aspects. Progress cannot be defined by the measurement of one metric. Trade-offs often exist. For example, a country’s economy may grow quickly, but if the growth is distributed unevenly, this would lead to an increase in inequality. Or instead, the growth could be deemed unsustainable if it leads to an excessive depletion of the earths natural resources. Indicators of progress across various dimensions can influence a countries average happiness or wellbeing score. As well as how these scores change over time, which is shown in the chart below:

Since we think the various measures of progress influence a country’s wellbeing, we therefore thought it would be useful to create a dataset that includes both indicators of progress and measures of wellbeing and happiness. These indicators are split into four main categories: economic data, social and governance data, wellbeing data and environmental data. This dataset is linked at the bottom of the page and it allows us to produce interesting analysis that looks at the relationship between a number of different variables and how they relate to measures of wellbeing and happiness, such as in the chart below:

Lastly, given our tendency to focus our analysis towards the UK, as this is the place that we know the best, we do also include the ONS wellbeing measures that are updated quarterly in our dataset. The chart below shows how they have behaved since the ONS began recording this data in 2011: