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My area of research is a unique concept: by linking economic strategy directly to people's emotional experiences it is possible to measure outputs such as happiness, joy and pain.

My research measures how happiness can be measured by financial and economic security in both the developed and developing world and is the first truly global collection of data on happiness ever recorded.
 
Not surprisingly we find people with high incomes tend to be happier than people with lower incomes. It suggests that economic development has a profound effect on raising levels of subjective wellbeing around the world. 

Our data collection suggests that more economically developed countries have to work harder to achieve an equal level of happiness than poorly developed parts of the world given the same financial increases.  Essentially, it is easy to make a difference in developing areas of the world - a small increase in financial security is not only easy to achieve but has a massive beneficial impact on people.

The same small increase in financial security in the developed world does not raise happiness immediately like it would in the developing world.

Compared to previous surveys, we decided that if you want to work out whether income or economic development makes a difference, it is important to have a lot of poor countries contained in your research.
 
We now have data from 142 countries around the world and as a result, we know a lot about the levels of well-being in people all across the developed spectrum.

A previous view suggested that if you are richer than your neighbour you are happier, but that the absolute level of income doesn't make any difference.
 
This view said that economic growth didn't do anything to improve human well-being; that is was perfectly possible for an economically poor country to be happier than a developed nation. The benefit is that an economic uplift leads directly to an emotional pay-off anywhere in the world.

My next question is whether economic inequality within a society is directly related to the level of happiness.  My aim is to discover if a redistribution of economic policies may actually also improve happiness. The broader agenda of my research is to think about whether positive economic policies do impact on human happiness.

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