World Happiness Report 2023 48 perceived to be high (as shown in Figure 2.3 in World Happiness Report 2020). In World Happiness Report 2015, we examined the distribution of life evaluations and emotions by age and gender, finding a widespread but not universal U-shape in age for life evaluations, with those under 30 and over 60 happier than those in between. Female life evaluations, and frequency of negative affect, were generally slightly higher than for males. For immigrants, we found in World Happiness Report 2018 that life evaluations of international migrants tend to move fairly quickly toward the levels of respondents born in the destination country. When considering the effects of COVID-19 on equality, it is interesting and important to see how different sub-groups of the population have fared during the pandemic. We did this by estimating an individual-level life evaluation equation using data from more than 560,000 respondents from 2017 through 2022, seeing how pre-pandemic life evaluations (2017-2019) were altered during the three COVID-19 years treated together (2020-2022).32 As shown in Table 2.2 (where the COVID-19 period effects are shown in the righthand column) our estimates suggest that COVID-19 tended to continue but not change pre-existing patterns of inequality. Respondents 60 years and older saw COVID-19 era improvements relative to those in the two younger age groups, with a COVID-years increase of 0.105 relative to the middle aged (t=3.7). There was also a significant increase during COVID-19 in the life evaluation gains from having someone to count on in times of trouble (+0.13, t=2.9). Globally, 80% of respondents have someone to count on, so the positive 0.13 COVID-19 interaction effect adds almost one-tenth of a point to average life satisfaction during the pandemic years. We also looked for COVID-19 effects by age, by gender, by gender and age together, by marital status, for the foreign-born, and for those who were unemployed or in ill-health. Despite the large sample size, none of these effects were significant to the 1% level. The only other COVID-19 effect significant at the 5% level or better was health. Those with health problems were approximately 10% more negatively affected by their health problems during the COVID years.33 This is generally similar to the pattern of results that we found last year for the first two years of COVID-19. Moving to the three-year coverage increased the size and significance of 0 .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8 .9 1 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 2022 Perceptions of corruption, top Perceptions of corruption, bottom Volunteered, top Volunteered, bottom Fig. 2.3: Global trends for the more and less happy 50% of each country (not population weighted) continued 0 .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8 .9 1 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 2022 Perceptions of corruption, top Perceptions of corruption, bottom Volunteered, top Volunteered, bottom (g) Perceptions of corruption, volunteering Note: 95% confidence intervals calculated by nonparametric bootstrap (with 200 draws) clustered at the country-year level.
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