Progress and World Happiness Rate: The impact of human rights in the estimation model

In the latter half of the last century, the study of national welfare has increasingly become more important for government policy, relying on GDP as a single metric of a country’s development. However, it is now recognized that traditional indicators such as GDP do not capture the entire spectrum of well-being in a population. To address this limitation, the World Happiness Report (WHR), annually released by the United Nations since 2012, aims to offer a multidimensional analysis of happiness in 150 countries, based on six explanatory variables. The purpose of this study is to critically evaluate the limits of the WHR model. Even though statistical models often require the relaxation of theoretical assumptions, here the objective is to test the robustness of the WHR regression and, where possible, explore possible improvements to maximize its accuracy and explanatory power. Initially, the problems of multicollinearity and heteroscedasticity were resolved by excluding two regressors from the initial model. This led to a reduced model with a modest improvement in the explanatory variable of the original model. In response to some of the most urgent challenges facing society today, this analysis aims to assess the influence of additional factors, which are not currently considered in the World Happiness Report (WHR), on overall happiness: ed- ucation, human rights, and the internal gap of happiness. Of these, human rights are identified as the strongest statistical predictors of happiness and enhance the fitness of the model without compromising reliability. These findings support the influence of civil liberties on well-being and suggest that including socio-political variables can provide policymakers with a more reliable tool to monitor and nurture sustainable development.