Do Property rights and Self-reported happiness go together across countries?

Across 104 countries the link before adjusting for anything is r = -0.00, on a scale from -1 (opposite) to +1 (in step). A version that uses only each country's rank gives +0.09.

Does the link hold within countries over time, not just across countries?

There are not enough years of data within countries to check this over time.

Does Property rights cause Self-reported happiness?

This analysis cannot answer that. It shows only that the two go together. A link between two country measures, adjusted or not, does not show that either one changes the other. Country figures also say nothing about individual people.

Property rights vs. Self-reported happiness

Holds up after adjusting for income

Across 104 countries, Property rights and Self-reported happiness rise and fall together at r = -0.00 (on a scale from −1 to +1, where 0 means no link). There is almost no link to explain.

Comparing countries across the middle half of self-reported happiness, 80.4% to 90.5% of respondents, property rights is worse by 0.00044 points at the top of that range than the bottom. Comparing only countries with similar national income, the gap is 0.0326 points.

Link before adjusting (r)-0.002p = 0.981 · 104 countries

After adjusting for national income-0.193p = 0.051 · likely range [-0.37, +0.00]

p, allowing for regions0.014standard error 0.056 · 7 regions

Check for luck (q)0.050across 17,292 pairs

How to read these.r runs from −1 (one goes up as the other goes down) to +1 (they rise together), and 0 means no link. Adjusting for national income means comparing countries with the same GDP per person, so differences in wealth can’t explain the link. Income is used in percentage terms, since an extra $1,000 means more to a poor country than to a rich one. p is how likely a link this strong would be if there were really none. Below 0.05 means it is unlikely to be chance. Very small values are written in short form: 1.1e-32 means a decimal point followed by 31 zeros and then 11, so very close to zero. The likely range is where the true figure probably lies, and a range that crosses zero means the link could easily be chance. Countries in the same region tend to resemble each other, so the third figure allows for that, which gives a fairer p. The standard error is the typical size of the error in r. Finally, testing this many pairs means some will look strong by luck alone. A q below 0.05 means this link is unlikely to be one of those.

Property rights · index (0-1)link with income +0.57 · moderate

Self-reported happiness · % of respondentslink with income +0.34 · moderate

“Link with income” is how closely each measure tracks GDP per person across countries, from −1 to +1.

Every country as a dot

best-fit line line after adjusting

Four ways to measure the link

Method	r	p	Countries
Standard (Pearson), not adjusted	-0.002	0.981	104
By rank (Spearman), not adjusted	+0.090	0.363	104
Standard (Pearson), adjusted for national income	-0.193	0.051	104
By rank (Spearman), adjusted for national income	-0.132	0.183	104

The rank version uses only each country’s place in line, from lowest to highest, so a few extreme countries count for less. The adjusted and unadjusted versions use the same 104 countries: those that report both measures and GDP per person. So the gap between them comes from the adjustment, not from a change in which countries are counted. Drop in the size of r after adjusting: -0.190 (a minus sign means it grew).

How solid is it?

Leaving out one country at a time, r ranges from -0.233 (without ZWE) to -0.158 (without RWA). The bar above shows that range on a scale from −1 to +1, with the solid line at the full result. The single country that moves r most: ZWE (-0.040).

Within each region

Countries are not separate, unrelated cases, and neighbors share a lot. A link that holds inside each region is far more believable than one that shows up only when comparing regions.

	n	r
East Asia & Pacific	14	-0.03
Europe & Central Asia	48	-0.25
Latin America & Caribbean	13	-0.23
Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan & Pakistan	14	-0.18

By income third

If the link shows up only in the richest third of countries, it is a feature of rich countries, not a general pattern.

	n	r
Poorest third	35	-0.13
Middle third	34	-0.32
Richest third	35	-0.09

By largest religious group

Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.

	n	r
Christians	61	-0.28
Muslims	29	-0.22

By last European coloniser

	n	r
Never a European colony	15	-0.05
Spain	12	-0.21
United Kingdom	25	+0.02

By official ideology

	n	r
Nationalist	16	-0.15
No strong official ideology	74	-0.18

By party system

	n	r
A few parties banned	13	-0.51
No parties banned	80	+0.02

Without outliers (countries far outside the middle half of countries on either measure, by more than one and a half times the width of that middle half): r = -0.090 after dropping 7 countries.

Two series, one country

Both measures over the years for one country you pick. The two charts are stacked so they share only the years along the bottom.

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Over time, within countries

Everything above compares countries with each other at one moment. This section compares each country only with itself over 0years. So a link here can’t come from anything about a country that stays the same, such as its history, geography, institutions or culture.

Not enough history inside each country to look at this over time. That needs countries measured for several years in a row, and at least one of these measures is measured too rarely.

The data

	index (0-1)	% of respondents	Years
Germany DEU	0.968	86.4%	2025, 2022
Iceland ISL	0.959	95.1%	2025, 2022
Croatia HRV	0.955	81.6%	2025, 2022
Spain ESP	0.954	88.8%	2025, 2022
Belgium BEL	0.954	94.3%	2025, 2010
France FRA	0.946	90.9%	2025, 2022
Denmark DNK	0.941	90.1%	2025, 2022
New Zealand NZL	0.935	92.9%	2025, 2022
Norway NOR	0.934	94.1%	2025, 2022
Lithuania LTU	0.934	73.7%	2025, 2022
Sweden SWE	0.933	93.8%	2025, 2022
Switzerland CHE	0.931	93.3%	2025, 2022
Poland POL	0.93	91%	2025, 2022
Slovak Republic SVK	0.929	78.9%	2025, 2022
Luxembourg LUX	0.929	93.6%	2025, 2010

Coppedge, M. et al., V-Dem Dataset v16, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project; Lindberg, S. I. et al., Varieties of Party Identity and Organization (V-Party) Dataset. Read from the V-Dem Institute's vdemdata package.
Haerpfer, C. et al., World Values Survey; EVS, European Values Study

Sources

Property rights

Property rights index

V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg · CC BY-SA 4.0 · updated annual (V-Dem); V-Party per election, to 2019

How far people have the right to own, buy, inherit and sell private property, including land, from 0 (virtually no one) to 1 (virtually everyone). It combines V-Dem's expert ratings for men and for women. Limits can come from the law, from the state failing to enforce it, or from custom and religion. It is about the right to property, not how much property people actually own.

Self-reported happiness

Share saying they are very happy or rather happy

World Values Survey Association and European Values Study · via Our World in Data · Free for non-commercial use with attribution · updated irregular (survey waves, roughly every 5 years)

A different question from the World Happiness Report's "ladder" question, and it ranks countries differently. The ladder asks people to rate their life from 0 to 10, where 10 is the best possible life. Answers to that lean heavily on material conditions, such as money and housing. This question asks directly whether people feel happy. Comparing the two is one of the more revealing pairs on the site. The survey runs in waves, not every year.

How this was computed

Data used: most recent value in 2010-2025; values come from 2010–2025. To adjust for income, each measure is first predicted from GDP per person (in percentage terms, on a log scale) with a straight-line fit. Only what is left over is then compared. This is called a partial correlation. The line is drawn the standard way (ordinary least squares), which picks the line that comes closest to all the countries at once. The error margins allow for countries in the same region resembling each other, using 7 World Bank regions. The q-value corrects for testing all 17,292 pairs at once, using the Benjamini–Hochberg method. Underlying data last updated V-Dem v16; V-Party v2. How the country data works · explore Property rights and Self-reported happiness

This page shows that two measures go together. It does not show that Property rights changes Self-reported happiness, or the reverse. These figures also describe countries, not individual people. See the ecological fallacy.