O.C., B.Comm. (U.B.C.), M.A., D.Phil. (Oxford), D.Litt. (Guelph, New Brunswick, Waterloo), LL.D. (McMaster), F.R.S.C.
John F. Helliwell founded the World Happiness Report in 2012 with Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs and has edited it ever since. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of British Columbia. Born in Vancouver in 1937, he studied commerce at UBC, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1959 and completed a D.Phil. in economics there in 1965. He returned to UBC in 1967 and taught there until 2002. His early work was in macroeconomics and energy policy: with colleagues at the Bank of Canada he built RDX2 (1971), a quarterly model of the Canadian economy. In the 1990s he turned to the effects of national borders on trade (How Much Do National Borders Matter?, 1998). Since 1998 he has studied well-being and its social sources: trust, social connections and the quality of government. From 2005 to 2017 he co-directed the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's program on Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being. In the report's chapters he and his co-authors rank countries by how their people rate their own lives and explain the differences between countries with six factors: income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption.