A cross-country analysis of the impact of governance on happiness
Date
2023-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The happiness of citizens continues to be of interest to governments around the world
as an indicator of the impacts of the efforts that are made towards genuine and holistic
development. As such, this paper contains a cross-country analysis of the impact of
governance on happiness. We make use of a fixed effects panel data regression to
assess the impact of the six World Governance Indicators (WGIs) on the Happiness
Scores of 108 countries in seven different regions around the world. This study covers
the years 2015 to 2021, wherein the years 2020 and 2021 contain one of the major
events in recent history in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, additional
cross-sectional analyses on the effect of the pandemic on the relationship between
governance and happiness are included in this study. The results prove to be quite
interesting with there being similarities and differences from the prior expectations of
the researchers regarding the signs and levels of significance of the governance
indicators and controls from one regression run to the next. Lastly, key statistically
significant relationships between governance and happiness in the context of the
COVID-19 pandemic were found.
Description
Keywords
happiness score, world governance indicators, COVID-19, citizens, development