Exploring Happiness Across Europe: A Cluster Analysis of EU Countries through Well-Being Indicators

Happiness is a concept that everyone wants to achieve. Although it is an emotion, various variables have been determined to describe it. In this sense, the most famous document that studies this notion is the World Happiness Report, created in partnership with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a sign that the well-being of citizens is very important in the process of achieving sustainability. Given the notoriety of this Report, the current research aims to take into analysis the indicators used in this paper to describe happiness, with the aim of grouping the 27 EU member states according to the degree of similarity identified between them. From a methodological point of view, the current study initially involves the application of factor analysis to determine a matrix of comprehensive factor scores, which is used as the starting point of the cluster analysis. Comparing the clustering of countries with the associated Life ladder values, it is found that there is a link between the results obtained and people's opinion about their happiness. In this sense, cluster 1 seems to contain countries with high Life ladder values, while the second cluster encapsulates countries with lower values of this indicator.