new economics foundation (lower case on purpose) / by Nic Marks, Andrew Simms, Sam Thompson and Saamah Abdallah
Book on the HP index: http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_publicationdetail.aspx?pid=225 Registration required
The European Happy Planet Index: An Index of Carbon Efficiency and Well-being in the EU: http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=242
The Happy Planet Map (provides country rankings in a map format): http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm
[From Dr. Peter Jasco's review] “…The mother of all happiness information resources is Ruut Veenhoven’s World Database of Happiness for historical data series, going back to 1946, and covering six decades. It has, however, two limitations. One is that data has been collected regularly from residents of only two dozen countries. The other is that the data is not available is a readily accessible format for downloading and further processing. You would need the SPSS or the STATA software… to work with the valuable data…
“The [Happiness] index is calculated by multiplying the life expectancy in the nation by its life satisfaction index and dividing it by the nation’s [ecological] footprint. Life expectancy at birth is a classic measure in every country’s basic statistics, and is readily available the Human Development Index of the UNDP’s Human Development Reports. Footprint and biocapacity data is available for 150 countries (144 in 2006) by the Global Footprint Network, and for the rest it was calculated based on carbon dioxide emissions and some other variables. Getting data for the life satisfaction component was the most difficult. It required four resources, including the World Database of Happiness the World Health Survey, the Latinobarometer and the Afrobarometer. For some countries additional sources had to be also used –and all these required significant consolidation and normalization. The report includes an exemplary chapter about the Data Sources and Estimation Procedures, another about Data Limitations, and a third one about the details of Calculating the HPI. These documents are easy to read and understand even for non-statisticians, and are very realistic and sincere about the problems and limitations.
“The report may be downloaded as a PDF document and consulted offline…Online browsing is more convenient , especially through the two interactive maps, one for the world, and one for Europe. On each one the desired country can be picked through hovering over the map, which shows the name of the country along with its HPI value. Picking a country through the pull-down menu shows an information sheet for Europe, and another for the World. The two have different structure, so the European map and list are not just subsets of the Global Happy Planet Index…” (ResourceShelf)
Filed under: New Web Tool | Tagged: Data
