The Relationship Between Happiness and Development of a Country: The Case of Lithuania

1. Questions and Hypothesis

1.1. Key Questions to be Answered:

• Is Lithuania becoming a happier state as its human development increases?
• How does Lithuania's happiness level compare to its global, continental and regional average?
• How does Lithuania's human development compare to its global, continental and regional average?
• What is the relationship between development and happiness?
• What factors could made Lithuania happier in the future? 
• Can we predict its future level of happiness?

1.2. Core HypothesisThe development in Lithuania is dependent and explained by its level of Human Development Index (HDI).

2. Background Information

2. 1. Human Development Index (HDI)The level of development is often mistakenly measured by pure income attribute, such as GDP or GDP per capita (PPP). The United Nations Human Development Index is more applicable measure to human development as it incorporates not only the level GDP, but also other metrics, such as the level of education achieved and human life expectency. The Human Developments Index (HDI) reflects the overall development level of the society as a whole, rather than its pure income.In this analysis, the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) is chosen as a key indicator of the development of the Republic of Lithuania.

2.2. World Hapiness ReportSince 2012, the United Nations also compile the official World Happiness Report. This report reveals the level of happiness achieved by any country in the world. The level of hapiness is based on based on respondent ratings of their own lives (i.e. by a survey), which the report also correlates with various quality of life factors.Looking at the top10 of the happiest countries in the world in 2020, the gut feeling kicks in that the richest countries tend to be also the happiest countries. However, is it always the case if we go deep down?If we take OECD country ranking of their happiness levels in 2019, one can spot that Lithuania ranks higher than Estonia, South Korea or even Japan, which are locally perceived as "the richer countries". Thus, guessing by the gut feeling, one may state that the level of happiness does not necessarily correspond to how rich or developed the country is.This analysis looks into whether the path of the country's development corresponds to its level of happiness. As a focus of this analysis, we specifically look into the case of the Republic of Lithuania.

3. DataIn this research, I extracted datasets from Kaggle. For both World Health Report and Human Development Index, I will extract data from MySQL databases, which concern the years from 2015 to 2019. This decision is limited by the fact that no earlier data for World Health Report could be recorded earlier than 2015 and no later data could be recorded for Human Development Index later than 2019. Each dataset has up to 200 rows, which correspondes to the number of countries in any particular year.

3. Findings

3.1. Is Lithuania becoming a happier state as its human development increases?

It appears that, as Lithuania developed it also showed a positive relationship with its level of happiness.

4. Conclusion

In this piece of research, one may come up with the following findings:

- Historically, countries have shown a positive relationship between their level of human development, determined by Human Development Index (HDI), and its level of happiness, assessed in World Health Report.

- However, the core hypothesis that the level of happiness in any country can be simply explained by its human development level is rejected.

- One cannot predict any country's level of happiness by pure human development level. The level of any state's happiness rather depends on broader development sense, which includes by human and social development and determining factors, such as: Social Support, Freedom to Make Life Choices, Government Corruption, Generosity.