Background

Various reasons will always make people feel happy under their circumstances. The feeling of happiness has been noted to vary from one country to another due to different aspects like economy, social status, politics and economy among other elements (Abdallah et al., 2009). When such factors are well upheld or maintained, then the level of happiness for individuals within these areas will always be happy. But when these aspects are not implemented as per the desire of the people, then the level of happiness will be decreased.

The significance of comparing the feeling of happiness against the issue of economic discrimination in a country like Mexico is to try and come up with a solid understanding on how to effectively increase the happiness levels for the people of the Japanese society. According to research, it has been noted that the people of the Japanese culture have a profound feeling of happiness despite the country having a sound economic system.

To effectively come up with ideas and techniques for improving the happiness standards of the Japanese society, we decided to choose the country of Mexico and compare its rate of happiness against its economic stats. This is because, Mexico is known of its controversial issues of migrants to America across the Mexico-US border (Abdallah et al., 2009). The effect of migrants has even steered America to build a wall along the Mexico-US border to prevent the high cases of migrants that are always reported along this borderline. Also, we chose Mexico because research entails that it is the second-ranked country regarding the levels of happiness even though Mexico has an economy that is very low (five times lower than that of US).

Therefore, research was conducted among the Mexican people to check on their feeling of happiness despite their economic level and below are the result outcomes of the research study.

Results

Table 1.  Feeling of Happiness in Mexico Stratified by Employment Status, the World Values Survey (WVS), 2010-2014

The variable that was used was the employment status of the respondents that were involved. The respondents were then allowed to choose between two options, i.e. Happy and Not happy. The responses were then recorded respectively for the different groups of respondents who included full-time workers, part-time workers, self-employed, retired, housewife, unemployed and others. The responses were then converted into percentages of the total responses for practical understanding and interpretation by other people.

From the table of all the respondents from the different work categories, the lowest percentage of the level of happiness that was recorded was 90.5% which was for the retired people while the highest was recorded from the respondents doing other jobs who recorded a 100% level of happiness. The most exciting result was from the “housewives and the unemployed” respondents who recorded 94.5% and 93% levels of happiness respectively. The percentages of the respondents who worked on “full time,” i.e., 94.5% was equal to that of the “housewives” and just slightly above that of the “unemployed” respondents.

Interpretation

According to the results that were obtained upon measuring the level of happiness of the Mexicans, we can indeed begin by acknowledging that the level of satisfaction does not necessarily relate to economic disparity. For instance, Mexico has a superficial economic level, but the results attest that its people are still okay and happy since the level of happiness that was recorded include (full-time; 94.5%, Housewife; 94.5%, Unemployed; 93.0%).

There are numerous reasons behind the happiness of the Mexican people. One of the reasons that explain the joy of the Mexicans is the fact that over the past few years, tremendous progress and been witnessed in ensuring that equal and quality healthcare services are accorded to all the citizens of Mexico (Nørgård, 2013). This was achieved in the year 2012 whereby a universal healthcare system was enacted thereby enabling every Mexican citizen to access this service more easily and conveniently and even with affordable rates.

Mexico has got a National System of Social Development which ensures that there is no form of discrimination on the cash and other vital services that the Mexican government offers to its citizens. Some of these services include health, education, food, labor, housing, social security and a sound environment (Marks, 2010). Therefore, by ensuring that all these services are effectively accessible by all the Mexican citizens, then there should be no reason as to why they cannot be happy. All the essential services that they require are indeed accessible at their convenience without any issues of disparity or discrimination irrespective of the type of work you are doing or whether you are employed or not.

Also, the Mexican government has implemented a policy that works towards the elimination of any form of discrimination that exists within the country. Through this policy, many people can evade the issues of discrimination for they do not want to suffer the consequences of the law whenever they go against it. This has thus promoted to a high level the joy and happiness of the Mexicans for they are content that any activities that they are involved in within their country, they will rarely encounter discrimination cases something that everyone desires to enjoy always.

In the year 2014, the government of Mexico introduced a tax on sugary drinks. The move aimed at countering the rising cases of obesity for the prices of the bottles that promote obesity would now be expensive than before thus forcing people to avoid them. By the end of the year 2014, the law had led to a decrease in the consumption of sugary drinks to about 12% (Marks, 2010). Such a move is hard to adopt by some people, but generally, it is for their benefit in the long run and therefore, they have to appreciate it and take it as a reason to feel happy.

The aspect of environmental sustainability in Mexico had received a rising attention political wise from the year 2007 when the country decided to incorporate it among its five pillars for the development plan of Mexico by the year 2012 and beyond (Marks, 2010). Also, Mexico became second globally to climate targets of long-term aspects into its national law, and it has endured numerous steps in the protection of its forests and all the biodiversity enclosed in them. As from such a level, the people of Mexico will always, therefore, be happy when they see their government leading the world by example in some crucial aspects like environmental conservation. They feel even more comfortable when they realize through the efforts of their government; their country is used as an example globally.

When critically evaluating the response results that were obtained from the research concerning the level of happiness against the economic status of Mexico. Indeed Mexico has one of the poor economic conditions, but its government has stipulated some of the best regulations and policies that encourage an ideal and favorable stay of the Mexicans. There are countries like America that have got very high and developed economic status but upon evaluation of their feeling of happiness, a country like Mexico with a deficient financial state is ranked above them.

Therefore, the research of this activity was very vital in laying down ideas and concepts that can be used in the improvement of the feeling of happiness of the Japanese society. Therefore, to ensure that the levels of satisfaction are increased among the Japanese community, there are numerous aspects that the Japanese government and the management of various components should strive to achieve.

Having attested that the feeling of happiness of the people in a given area does not rely on the aspect of economic disparity; one should enlighten the Japanese society to elect good leaders who will ensure that they implement diverse aspects developmental and sustainable aspects that will improve the people’s happiness. People will never have a feeling of joy of they still strain in acquiring or assessing some of the elements that promote their daily life activities. This has been proven from the outcomes of the feeling happiness results that were obtained from the people of Mexico who had several jobs, and even some of them had little jobs, and other was unemployed but still were happy as those who were employed. It was due to numerous aspects that the Mexican government had achieved for them that made them content and maintained a feeling of happiness.

References

Abdallah, S., Thompson, S., Michaelson, J., Marks, N., & Steuer, N. (2009). The Happy Planet Index 2.0: Why good lives don’t have to cost the Earth.

Marks, N. (2010). Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index. TED.

Nørgård, J. S. (2013). Happy degrowth through more amateur economy. Journal of Cleaner Production, 38, 61-70.

 
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