is strongly related to both log household income and log GDP per capita, and these estimates reflect the impact of income
on positive and negative affect in roughly equal measure.41
Figure 21 presents the cross-country comparisons graphically. The top row reveals that in richer countries a larger
proportion of the population is more likely to report each positive experience (except feeling “particularly excited or
interested in something”), and the bottom row shows that a smaller proportion of the population in richer countries
typically reports negative experiences. The regressions reported in the figure show how the proportion of the population
agreeing with each statement rises or falls with log GDP per capita (and hence these estimates are scaled differently than
the probit coefficients reported in Table 6). Interestingly, as in the analysis of self-assessed happiness, Nigeria (the poorest
country in this figure) is an outlier for all of the measures of positive affect, with Nigerians reporting a much higher
likelihood of experiencing positive feelings than residents of other low-income countries. The bottom row shows the
relationship between each of the five measures of negative feelings and GDP per capita. In all cases the negative affect-
GDP gradient is negative, with a higher proportion of people in poor countries experiencing negative feelings. (These
measures of negative affect suggest that Nigerians have a more typical experience for their income.)
We next turn to a particularly rich series of well-being questions contained in the Gallup World Poll. Respondents
are asked to report whether they experienced “the following feeling during a lot of the day yesterday.” The feelings
include enjoyment, physical pain, worry, sadness, boredom, depression, anger, and love. The top of the bottom panel of
Table 6 shows that among the positive emotions, the enjoyment-income gradient is positive and similar for both the
between- and the within-country estimates. More income is clearly associated with more people having enjoyment in their
day. Love is less clearly related to income, although within countries, more income is associated with being more likely to
experience love. Among the negative emotions, physical pain, boredom, depression, and sadness are all lower at higher
levels of income, at both the national and the individual level. The within-country estimates also reveal that worry and
anger fall with income.
Figure 22 allows a fuller examination of the proportion of people in a country experiencing these emotions and
GDP per capita. The percent of people in a country who enjoyed the previous day rises from an average of 65 percent in
low income countries to 80 percent in the wealthiest countries. Depressions, pain, boredom, and anger all appear to fall
linearly with rises in log GDP per capita. The magnitudes of these relationships are large: compared with the poorest
countries those in the wealthiest countries are a third less likely to experience pain or depression and a fifth less likely to
report boredom.
The final set of regressions analyze the relationship between income and some more specific experiences in
people’s lives, such as feeling respected, smiling, engaging in interesting activities, feeling proud, and learning. Income is
positively related to wanting to have more days like yesterday, with feeling well rested, with feeling treated with respect,
with being able to choose how to spend your time, with smiling or laughing, with feeling proud, with having done
41 The summary measure of net affect is computed by adding up the positive and negative measures, with zero indicating an equal
number of positive and negative experiences.
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