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Happiness, low CO2 emissions key to success

2 July 2008

Professor Ng believes his index gives a true measure of a nation's success.

Monash University economist Professor Yew-Kwang Ng has devised a thought-provoking method of measuring a country's ability to achieve success in an environmentally-friendly way.

Professor Ng's Environmentally Responsible Happy Nation Index (ERHNI) is calculated as the happiness of a nation's average resident, minus the number of years of unhappiness the nation inflicts on the global community as measured by its per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Professor Ng said ERHNI was a true measure of a nation's success because achieving happiness was most people's ultimate aim and global warming was one of the biggest universal threats to well-being.

"If the principle of a good ERHNI rating was accepted, the policies of governments around the world would focus on improving lives without excessively harming the environment," Professor Ng said.

Under ERHNI, Professor Ng used accepted economic indicators for estimating happiness -- health, safety, education, purchasing power, life expectancy data and information from happiness surveys -- to calculate that the average Australian enjoys the equivalent of 18.4 years of "perfect happiness" during their life.

Per capita CO2 emissions were used to estimate the average Australian inflicted costs equivalent to 9.5 years of unhappiness on the global community.

This gave Australia an ERHNI rating of 8.9 years, ranking it 43 in the world and equal-sixth with Singapore in the Asia-Pacific region. Australia was ranked behind New Zealand (14.3), Malaysia (14.2), Indonesia (10), Philippines (9.3) and Mongolia (9.2).

Many of the highest rankings under ERNHI are found in Western Europe, where countries have happy residents and low per capita CO2 emission.

Switzerland rates as the best (22.8), followed by Denmark (19.3). In North America, Canada (11.3) ranks higher than the US (8.1) because although the countries have similar happiness levels, the US's per capita CO2 emissions are much higher.

Professor Ng said that by striving for a high ERHNI rating a nation would not only make its own people happy, it would increase the ability of other countries to achieve sustainable happiness.

Professor Ng said ERHNI could be refined to include a more comprehensive environmental measure of unhappiness.

"I hope with further improvements, ERHNI will lead to some re-orientation of both the market and national governments towards something more fundamentally valuable and less damaging to our life support system," he said.