Why is Costa Rica so Happy?
As Christmas time approaches, I started to get more and more excited about my family’s upcoming trip to the beautiful country of Costa Rica. Nobody in my family has ever stepped foot in this nation but I have heard many great things about the place. With the departure date coming up soon, I decided to do a little research about the country I am about to visit and learn about some of the things that they have to offer. I immediately went to google and just searched “Costa Rica” hoping to find out about cool places to go, foods to try, and some of their cultural aspects that are different from here in America. What I found instead was an article that claimed Costa Rica is the world’s happiest country. This article immediately piqued my interest as to why this small country in Central America was announced as Earth’s happiest place to be in 2020. I wondered what exactly made this country so special and why it was ranked above all other nations. Could it be their beautiful beaches? Or maybe their forests which are rich with wildlife and nature? I mean the country’s name does translate to “rich coast” so maybe it has something to do with their supply of natural resources. These are all just speculations so I decided to use the World Development Indicators dataset from WorldBank.org in order to see what kinds of factors differentiate this country from the others.
I used the dataset of World Development Indicators, which has data about all different aspects of a country’s wealth, health, and other attributes. I decided to compare Costa Rica with Honduras and Panama, which are both countries of similar size and location to Costa Rica, to see what makes this country so special. I also threw in the United States in order to see how it compares with where I am from. The article where I first found this idea of Costa Rica being the happiest country came from the Happy Planet Index. This article said that Costa Rica’s happiness rating comes from the country’s citizens’ reported happiness as well as environmental factors that would affect overall happiness. I decided to look at three different metrics for the three countries I am comparing. Those metrics are school enrollment, forest area, and health expenditure by the government. I used data from the years of 2016–2019 because this was the most recent data available that had information for all four countries. I believe all of these factors contribute to how happy a country’s citizens are. I chose school enrollment because people are happier when they are able to receive a proper education that allows them to go into higher education or higher paying jobs. Forest area was chosen because the article mentioned that Costa Rica maintains a large emphasis on preserving the environment and natural landmarks. Lastly, health expenditure was chosen because citizens who live longer and healthier lives tend to be happier throughout those lives. Comparing these factors between Costa Rica and its neighbors will help get an idea as to why this country towers over the rest in terms of its peoples’ happiness.
Diving into this analysis, I want to start with health expenditure as I believe this is the most important factor in happiness. Having access to health resources and living a healthy life is extremely necessary for living happily. Comparing the government expenditure on health between these countries, it was unsurprising to see that Costa Rica topped the charts with an average of 27% of the government spending being spent on healthcare and medical resources. This means that over a quarter of all government spending is spent just on the healthcare of its citizens. This shows just how much Costa Rica cares about its people and their wellbeing. This data proves what the article was saying about how Costa Rica prioritizes the health of their citizens and how it is ingrained in their culture to help one another. However, taking a look at the graph above shows that Costa Rica is spending less and less on healthcare every year, which could mean that they won’t stay in first place for very long. The United States came in second place for government spending on healthcare with about 22% of their budget spent. This was somewhat surprising as the US promotes private healthcare for the most part. However there are a lot of government programs like medicare and medicaid that the government provides money for so this does make sense. The United States is ranked 19th on the Happy Planet Index so there must be other factors that caused the US to have a much lower ranking than Costa Rica. Costa Rica’s neighboring countries, Panama and Honduras, had government healthcare spending percentages of around 20% and 10% respectively. Honduras has an extremely low amount of spending on healthcare compared to other countries being analyzed. The Happy Planet index showed that Honduras was ranked at 9th place and Panama was ranked at 4th. Besides the United States’ ranking, this shows that health expenditure is a good indicator of the happiness experienced in a nation.
The second factor in happiness mentioned in the article was about how Costa Rica’s culture places a strong emphasis on conservation and sustainability. In order to think about this in a quantitative way, I used the data series of forest coverage as a percentage of land area for each country. The percentage of land covered by forests was used since all of these countries are different sizes. The amount of forest cover in each country shows how much these countries are willing to preserve nature and biodiversity. People that live in an environment that is rich with natural life and fresh air to breath will directly impact their happiness. The lowest amount of forest cover was in the United States. The US has less than half of the forest cover as the other central American countries. This is most likely due to the large amount of land that makes up the United States and the many different types of landscapes that are within it. The US is so massive that it would be hard to compete with these countries that are set in the rainforest climate. So this has less to do with America’s view on conservation and more on its geographical land area. The other countries, Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica, all have very similar percentages of forest cover with around a 57% average. Since these numbers are all so similar, it would be hard to make a claim that the forest cover is the reason why Costa Rica is so much happier than these other countries. There is not enough evidence to prove that this alone makes a difference.
The third factor in happiness that the Happy Planet Index article mentioned to be a reason for Costa Rica’s happiness was education. The amount of money each country’s government spends on education is important because having education resources allows for their citizens to get higher paying jobs. These higher paying jobs will give citizens more financial freedom and in turn a happier, less stressful life. It makes sense that Costa Rica spends the most money on education compared to other countries with about 7% of the GDP spent on education resources. Comparing that to the United States, whose expenditure was around 5%, this is not a huge difference. Honduras also spent an average of 5.5% over the four years analyzed. The only major outlier was Panama whose expenditure on education was only about 2%. It makes sense that Costa Rica would put such a large emphasis on education, especially coming from an area of the world that experiences a lot of political issues. It is difficult to determine how much education plays into happiness based on these numbers. The United States is only 2% behind Costa Rica in terms of educational expenditures, but is far lower on the world’s happiness rankings. This shows that maybe education is not the most important thing to think about when considering why a country’s citizens are so happy.
When looking at the data and the analysis done on these different countries, it was interesting to see how some of these countries’ attributes may affect their citizens’ happiness. Costa Rica was ranked number one by the Happy Planet Index, and after looking at education, forest preservation, and healthcare, it looks to be that healthcare is the most important factor in determining the happiness of a country. The evidence shows that Costa Rica spent far more on its healthcare and medical resources than any of the other countries. Costa Rica spent over a quarter of its total government spending on just healthcare services alone. The other countries did not put nearly as much emphasis on healthcare as Costa Rica. The data shows that Costa Rica is the happiest country because of how they take care of their citizens. This also proves that health is the most important factor in one’s happiness. Overall, Costa Rica is 2020’s happiest country due to the fact that they spend the most on health care and health services for their people.
