An index that measures the level of happiness, or contentment, in a society. In practice, a happiness index combines subjective contentment measured through questionnaires with a range of objective indices such as child mortality and life expectancy. The motivation for the use of a happiness index is that monetary measures, such as gross domestic product per capita, are too narrow to capture all the features that impact on social welfare. A happiness index is compiled and published by the World Values Survey.

http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org The website of the World Values Survey.