Explaining happiness trends in Europe

Abstract

In Europe, differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs—increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal conclusion from a time-series study of 10 Northern, Western, and Southern European countries with the requisite data. In the present study, cross-section analysis of recent data gives a misleading impression that economic growth, social capital, and/or quality of the environment are driving happiness trends, but in the long-term, time-series data, these variables have no relation to happiness.