World Happiness Report 2021

I did a real simple data project on what influences ‘happiness’ in Southeast Asian countries, led by researchers in collaboration with various universities, foundations and international organisations. The actual report can be found here.

I got to know of this dataset through Kaggle. The countries dataset has all the ASEAN countries except Brunei — not sure why. Gallup uses the “Ladder” question, which is the basis for the ladder score you’ll see. And there are some interesting variables — log GDP per capita (wealth), life expectancy at birth, perceptions of corruption, generosity (charitable giving frequency among them), social support, positive affect (how positive do you feel), and negative affect.

What follows will be a bunch of charts done in R using ggplot2 and some basic labels.

According to this, Singapore is the happiest country, and Cambodia and Myanmar are kind of tied.

Not surprising, wealth is strongly correlated with high ladder score.