The World Happiness Report tries to quantify well-being across the world. It does this by taking select indicators from the Gallup World Poll, to measure both "life evaluations" – based on things like income and life expectancy – as well as emotional responses, which effectively means asking people how they feel. The result is an average estimation of subjective well-being that depends as much on individual responses as it does to objective parameters like the economy. And they can be surprising.

The 2015 report, put together by the UN's Sustainable Development Solutions Network and edited by economists John F Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs, finds that people in Pakistan and Bangladesh consider their well-being as being better than those in India.


How is that possible? Looking specifically at the way the report is put together reveals that almost three quarters of the final number is based on evaluations from six key variables: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and freedom from corruption.


Added to this are the calculations of positive and negative affects, described somewhat obliquely for laymen as "the average of laughter and enjoyment for other waves where the happiness question was not asked" and "the average of previous-day affect measures for worry, sadness and anger for all waves."

The report helpfully breaks this down for us in a colour-coded format.


The colour-coded sub-bars depict how much each of these factors affects the final outcome, and based on this all six seem to have a greater effect on the final number for India than for Pakistan. But the last sub-bar, in grey, adds in an estimation of the difference between how happy the report writers' expected each country to be and what the people ended up actually reporting.


Essentially what the chart seems to be saying is that people in Pakistan and Bangladesh appear to be happier than Indians, simply because they think they are more well-off.


The report, the third of its kind, also covers the change in happiness levels over the past half-decade. South Asia generally seems to be regressing, except for Bangladesh, which has improved in well-being between 2005-07 and 2012-14. Here again, India seems to be the last in line in the region. Understandably, Greece, with all of its economic concerns has seen its happiness disappear the most dramatically over the past decade.


Vox's Dylan Matthews points out something else as well: if you go by the World Happiness Report's metrics, money does actually buy happiness. "The most striking thing about the map is that people rich countries are, overall, considerably more satisfied with their lives than people in poor countries." That may not be all that surprising, but considering Happiness Indices have often been floated as ways to prove that poverty should not be the only measure of well-being, it's worth reiterating.