Toward achieving sustainable development goal 3: Determinants, innovations, and reactions from 110 countries with different income levels

Well-being has a major impact on sustained development of economies worldwide; and unionized well-being-improving decisions are key to achieving SDG3, but research on such is rare. This article investigates the determinants of well-being using Life Ladder (LLD), log GDP per capita (LGDP), social support (SSP), and life expectancy at birth (HLE) for panels of 110 countries selected from World Happiness Report 2020, and grouped according to income levels. The empirical panel Granger causality results show that LGDP, SSP and HLE Granger causes LLD in the long-run for low, upper-middle, and high-income countries; but find no evidence of such for the Lower-Middle Income Countries and Global Panel. Evidence from the impulse response and variance decomposition analysis shows that majority of the innovations needed to promote well-being can be found within LLD itself. The policy implication is that though all countries plan to improve well-being, the determinants, innovations, and corresponding reactions vary across countries.