A D3-based visualisation of global world happiness levels and the residuals that affect them.
The World Happiness Report is an annual publication from the UN's Sustainable Development Solutions Network. These reports aim to provide a holistic overview of a country's well-being by aggregating life evaluation scores from the Gallup World Poll survey. The output is an average Happiness Score out of 10 for the country as a whole. Following score calculations, the Report goes a step further by estimating how strongly a set of 6 key development residuals (economic production, family/social support, life expectancy, absence of corruption, freedom, & generosity) correlate to higher life evaluations in each country. These residuals are scored out of 10, such that the sum of a country's residuals results in its overall Happiness Score. An additional residual, called "Dystopia", is a hypothetical country that comprises of the lowest scores across all 6 residuals. It is used as a benchmark against which contributions from all other residuals can be compared. It is important to note that the residuals' values do not directly change the total Happiness Scores reported by each country. Rather, the values reflect how important the corresponding residuals are to citizens' overall Happiness levels, offering some insight into priorities across countries and why some may rank higher than others. Since the initiative's first issue in 2012, the reports have gained significant traction amongst civil & governmental organisations, who use the statistics to inform policy-making decisions, reflecting a changing global paradigm where greater emphasis is being placed on the welfare of citizens. This project sources data from Kaggle's World Happiness Report dataset to provide visualisations of how global happiness levels & the estimated weighting of key residuals have changed from 2015 to 2019. The official World Happiness documents and analyses from TrackingHappiness.com were referenced for explanations.