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Happiness in Denmark and Switzerland

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The Good Society

Abstract

Everybody wants to be happy and certainly nobody wants to be unhappy. Danes and Swiss are very satisfied with their lives. International studies on happiness systematically show both countries at the top (see Frey and Stutzer 2000; Stutzer and Frey 2008 or Veenhoven 2011 etc.) and both are often labeled as success models for economic development and societal achievements in comparative analyses. However, this book also sketches and uncovers differences between the two countries with respect to institutions, socio-demographic and economic conditions. Thus, we investigate in this chapter whether Danes and Swiss are so happy for the same or different reasons and which factors matter for their respective happiness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This chapter has been written with the help of Marco Portmann and David Stadelmann.

  2. 2.

    The United Kingdom and France have reacted to these suggestions and there are ongoing efforts to introduce certain measures and insights into the public debate. The Kingdom of Bhutan is said to try to maximize general happiness.

  3. 3.

    In the assessment of their happiness, individuals mitigate a string of issues in international comparisons of living conditions.

  4. 4.

    The well informed reader may, of course, skip Sect. 4.2 without losing any information on the comparison between Denmark and Switzerland.

  5. 5.

    Clearly, this study (Stutzer and Frey 2008) has some direct practical implications: Think twice whether all the time lost in commuting is really worth the money!

  6. 6.

    For further literature refer to Frey and Stutzer (2002) or Dolan et al. (2008).

  7. 7.

    It could be argued that happiness scores should be considered as ordinal because respondents can express their answer only in integers. This reasoning suggests the use of ordered probit estimations. However, Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters (2004) and others show that results from OLS-estimations are very close to those obtained by using alternative techniques and many happiness studies use OLS.

  8. 8.

    Unfortunately, the authors did not include Switzerland in their study.

  9. 9.

    The subsample of, respectively, French or German speaking Swiss is defined by restricting the sample to, first, Swiss citizens and, second, to those indicating, respectively, French or German as their first language spoken at home. We have chosen this definition because the regions captured in the ESS do not fully coincide with language borders. Moreover, the sample for Italian speaking Swiss is very small for statistical analysis.

  10. 10.

    Interestingly we find regional difference within Switzerland. While the happiness margin of women over man is comparable between Danes and German speaking Swiss the effect of being a women is much less pronounced for French speaking Swiss as well as Italian speaking Swiss and migrants.

  11. 11.

    We note that the income gain from high education is fairly modest in Denmark.

  12. 12.

    The negative effect is a little bit more pronounced for French speaking Swiss.

  13. 13.

    Note that we also analyzed the effect of being a Danish and Swiss citizens living in other European countries (see Sect. 4.3). Danes living abroad are not happier than citizens of the chosen host country while we find positive effects for Swiss citizens abroad.

  14. 14.

    These definitions follow the definitions used in the European Social Survey.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Political Studies CEPOS, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Henrik Christoffersen

  2. Department of Political Science, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Michelle Beyeler

  3. Department of Economics Center for Public Finance, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Reiner Eichenberger

  4. Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Peter Nannestad

  5. Department of Economics and Business, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Martin Paldam

Authors
  1. Henrik Christoffersen
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  2. Michelle Beyeler
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  3. Reiner Eichenberger
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  4. Peter Nannestad
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  5. Martin Paldam
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Appendix

Appendix

Table 4.3 Satisfaction with life of Danish and Swiss women and men
Full size table
Table 4.4 Satisfaction with life of Danish and Swiss with highest incomes and below highest income
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Table 4.5 Satisfaction for French and German speaking Swiss
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Christoffersen, H., Beyeler, M., Eichenberger, R., Nannestad, P., Paldam, M. (2014). Happiness in Denmark and Switzerland. In: The Good Society. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37238-4_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37238-4_4

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