Inflation, unemployment and punitive borrowing costs – read interest rates – are said by those in the know to be sure-fire determinants of whether the citizens of a nation are a miserable lot. With all three indicators having been the hallmarks of many nations last year, what with the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the prices of energy and other essential commodities, one would have expected the competition for the dubious honour of the Most Miserable Nation in 2022 to be stiff.

But there was a clear winner, and that’s a country on South Africa’s doorstep – Zimbabwe – according to Hanke’s Annual Misery Index (HAMI), which is compiled by its namesake, US economist Steve Hanke. The index is the culmination of a process which sees Hanke add up the year-end unemployment, inflation and bank-lending rate statistics of the 157 ranked nations, before subtracting from the sum a nation’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP).

A misery index is not a new thing. The first iteration, known as the Economic Discomfort Index, was created in the 1960s by economist Arthur Okun, who served as chairperson of the US Council of Economic Advisers during the tenure of President Lyndon Johnson. That index was equivalent to the sum of a country’s inflation and unemployment rates.

Another eminent American economist, Robert Barro, who had a stint as a professor at Harvard University, modified the original misery index by including the 30-year government bond yield and the output gap for real GDP.

Hanke introduced his own index in the late 2000s, building on Barro’s index and applying it to countries beyond the US. He initially amended Barro’s index by replacing the 30-year government bond yield with lending rates. A further amendment, introduced in 2022, was the doubling of the unemployment-rate component when compiling the index.

So much for the history of the misery index.

As stated earlier, Zimbabweans are far and away the unhappiest bunch on Planet Earth, and it’s not difficult to see why. The country has experienced endemic inflation for a long time, and this has included two episodes of hyperinflation, during which the inflation rate exceeded 50% for 30 or more days. Official yearly inflation topped 243.8% last year. The country is not faring any better on the interest rate front either, with the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe having pegged its policy rate at 150% in February this year.

Zimbabwe’s largely inflation-driven 414.7 score on the HAMI in 2022 was significantly higher than second-placed Venezuela’s 330.8 score. However, like their Zimbabwean counterparts, Venezuelans’ misery stems from rampant inflation in the South American country.

South Africa may not be in the same league as the likes of Zimbabwe and Venezuela, but the citizens of this country are not exactly the poster children of happiness, if the latest HAMI is anything to go by. Being the sixteenth most miserable in the world means the only places in Africa besides Zimbabwe where the levels of misery are higher are Ghana, Angola and Sudan. The last mentioned has been in the throes of bitter strife since a coup in 2019 – remember?

According to the HAMI – which is compiled using statistics from the Economist Intelligence Unit, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and International Labour Organisation and the central banks of the ranked countries – the main cause of South Africans’ misery is the country’s high unemployment rate, which hit 32.9% in the first quarter of this year, a 0.2 percentage point increase on the preceding quarter.

The other contributors to misery, namely inflation and interest rates, are also at multidecade highs. Unless there is a trend reversal, South Africans could be much more miserable than they are currently before we know it.