Brazil in the World Happiness Report from 2019 to 2021
What is the World Happiness Report?
The World Happiness Report is a survey created in 2012 on the citizens’ perception of happiness in each country. To accomplish this, citizens are asked to choose their level of happiness on a ladder varying from 0 to 10; 10 being the best possible life and 0 being the worst. This study includes 156 countries.
The variables used to explain the levels of happiness are income, healthy life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom and perceptions of corruption.
On their website, it is possible to download the full report, which is really interesting. For data analysis proposes, I’m using the dataset available on Kaggle.
2021’s Report
The latest report available is focused on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the countries and how governments responded to it.
Not surprisingly, the Nordic countries are at the top again.
Some of the fundamental explanations for this is that these countries have high taxes, which allows them to provide high-quality public services in health and education and to provide a high level of social security. These countries are also more equitable when it comes to gender.
Although, it is important to highlight that happiness is very subjective and that happiness and life quality are not the same, even if it’s easier to be happy with a higher life quality; those countries still face significant suicide rates.
This year, Brazil holds 32nd place.
I decided to take information from 2019 as it corresponds to the beginning of Bolsonaro’s government.
Let’s get to the data!
First, I imported the libraries that I’ll use and the data. In this case, I have two CSV files, one for 2021 and the other that includes all years till 2020.
As we can see, the CSVs does not have the same columns.
Here we can check the top countries on the 2021’s report, and as we’ve seen before, we’ll find mostly Nordic countries:
We can also easily see the countries with the poorest score:
We can see that the average of the results for the ladder score and the other indicators among all the countries are the following:
The maximum:
And the minimum:
Now, to match the column names in my two CSV files, I am going to add a “year” column to my 2021 dataset and rename the other columns in my 2020 dataset.
Now we can merge the two files and select the data that we are interested in: columns, years and country.
I used Matplotlib and Seaborn to visualize how Brazil’s Ladder Score has variate between 2019 and 2021. For the next graphics, I just changed my “y”.
As we can see, the 2020 ladder score dropped considerably compared to 2019. This may be a consequence of the impact of the Covid19 and the mismanagement of the government concerning the pandemic. For 2021, the ratings have improved but they did not reach the 2019 levels.
Looking at the WHR variables, we see that there was no relevant change in GDP per capita:
One of the government actions that may have contributed to the maintenance of the GDP is the “emergency aid” (Auxílio Emergencial); a financial help to minimize the damage caused by the social crisis generated by the pandemic.
Although the GDP per capita remained at a similar level, we must take into account the inflation in the price of food, which reached about 15% in 2020, being much higher in primary foods such as rice (70% more expensive) and beans (50%). The inflation affects the poorest, and it’s not reflected in the GDP, therefore, it will be important to also take a look at the Gini index, which indicates the social inequality, and compare it to 2019s.
Social support has also felled in 2020. It recovered a little in 2021 but it’s yet under the 2019 level.
As this indicator is based on relationships, this drop may be a consequence of the quarantine and social isolation imposed by the sanitary situation.
Regarding the Life expectancy, it remained at the same level, but we can’t skip the fact that right now, Brazil has more than 300.000 deaths caused by the Covid-19 and the government’s mismanagement of the pandemic; the president insisted in underestimate the virus as a “little flu”, and refused to take national lockdown measures, giving place for the development of new and more contagious variants, such as the P1 variant.
Regarding freedom, we can see that it has dropped significantly in 2020. This indicator is a little bit hard to decode; it’s a result based on the answers to the question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”. The responses are subjective and we are unable to find the root cause for the negative responses.
For 2020, we can imagine that the pandemic had a negative impact since it has limited freedom in many different ways; from not being able to travel, to not being able to see your grandchildren. There was a small improvement in 2021.
Generosity is an indicator measured in charitable terms, based on how much the survey participants have donated during the year.
In this case, it has a negative value; if it’s closer to zero, it means that there were more donations.
We can see that concerning 2019, in 2020 there was an increase in generosity while in 2021 the rate fell considerably.
As a Brazilian, I would like to just add a comment about that: In my experience, most Brazilians are not into monetary donations to institutions, their generosity is mostly showed by giving money or food to homeless people and participating in volunteering projects. I think that this indicator could be improved by adding more questions regarding generosity.
And to finish, we have the last parameter regarding the perceptions of corruption that includes both political institutions and the private sector.
We can see that there were no relevant changes in the ratings. Brazil is far away from Nordic countries like Finland with 0.18 for 2021 or Denmark, with 0.17, but it goes along with the average for 2021; 0.72.
Concerning this topic, I strongly encourage you to take a look into the “Observatorio de la democracia”, which does a more profound study about the perceptions of corruption in Latin America. Unfortunately, their last report on Brazil is from 2018.
My conclusion:
I used to take a look at the World Happiness Report: I just looked at the ranking and the notes without going deeper and I found it very interesting to see what is behind it.
When I started to analyse the data, I had two preassumptions: that the GDP per capita would drop considerably between 2019 and 2021 and health as well. The analysis allowed me to see that these assumptions were wrong with a GDP and health staying at approximately the same level.
This allowed me to ask myself about the report indicators. A very low life expectancy says a lot about a country, but for countries that have reached an expectation close to the average level, this value does not say much about health; The Covid-19 did not affect this variable in any way and we also do not see mental health problems reflected in it.
Generosity is also measured by a singular question for all countries, but what if each country has a different form of solidarity? In many countries, financially helping an institution is difficult due to the low income of citizens. What about volunteering, helping neighbors, etc?
As for social support, in addition to the support of friends and family, I think that social security can have an important influence on happiness, but this aspect is not included into the quantitative study.
The same concerning GDP. When talking about GDP without talking about social inequality, we will not have a clear reflection of society.
Regarding the indicators of Brazil in Bosonaro times, the conclusion is that there was a degradation in most indicators in 2020 accompanied by the health crisis, and a slight improvement in 2021, which is just beginning and we cannot say that it is with the right foot.
Note: This text was not written for academic purposes, it was an excuse to play with data and use tools that I am learning about.
