Does Being Globalized Matter for Happiness in African Countries?

Nowadays globalization seems to be an irresistible phenomenon that affects all countries around the world, including developed and developing countries. In that context, the purpose of this paper is to check whether increasing globalization level spreads happiness in Africa. We employ a dynamic panel data model on 34 African countries over the period 2006–2019 to assess the effect of globalization on happiness. We used the two-step system generalized method of moments estimator to control for potential endogeneity of regressors and unobserved heterogeneity. We find that globalization is positively associated with happiness. Among the sub-indexes of globalization, economic and political globalization enhance happiness while social globalization worsens happiness. In addition, the effects of globalization on happiness are sensitive to the level of human development, democratization and natural resource wealth. Specifically, the positive effect of globalization turns out to be more robust in democratic and non-oil producing countries than in autocratic and oil-producing countries. Similarly, the effects of globalization are positive in high-human development countries while these effects remain negative in low-human development countries. Furthermore, the results also show that unemployment and inflation are the channels through which economic globalization positively affects happiness.