More than one study has tried to determine the financial price of happiness. Some look at wealth. Others look at income.

One well-publicized study last year put the optimal income for happiness at around $75,000. Rising income, it turns out, produces greater happiness until you get to around $75,000. After that, there are diminishing returns, with more income leading to little or no gain in real happiness. 

This is a fraught question, of course. “Happiness” itself is not easily defined, and money doesn't always guarantee it. And the financial requirements for happiness usually depend on geography, peer groups and other external factors. 

The latest to weigh in on the issue is Skandia International’s Wealth Sentiment Monitor. It found that the global average “happiness income” is around $161,000 for 13 countries surveyed. The United States wasn’t specifically measured. (Read more: Why Millionaires Prefer Dogs) 

But there was a wide range of answers depending on the country. Dubai residents need the most to feel wealthy. They said the needed $276,150 to be happy. Singapore came in second place, with $227,553, followed by Hong Kong, with $197,702. 

The region with the most modest needs for happiness is Europe. Germans only need $85,781 to be happy, placing them lowest on the list. The French need $114,000, while the British need $133,000. 

The survey doesn’t ask about total wealth needed to feel happy. But it does ask about the amount of wealth needed to feel “wealthy.” Globally, the average amount needed to feel wealthy was $1.8 million. 

Singaporeans took the lead on the “wealth” needs, with $2.91 million needed to feel wealthy. Dubai ranked second with $2.5 million, followed by Hong Kong with $2.46 million. (Read more: Where to Live If You Want to Be a Millionaire) 

Surveys show that among Americans, most say they need $1 million or more to feel wealthy.

 All of this shows that wealth and financial happiness is not an absolute number, but is relative to your peers and surroundings. Living in Dubai, with all those oil barons and oligarchs, the needs are higher. In Germany, where wealth is more evenly distributed, the needs are not as high.

 How much wealth or income would you need to feel happy?

Follow Robert Frank on Twitter: @robtfrank

Vincent Thian / AP

A worker prepares to start business for the day at a traditional food stall in Beijing. Over the past two decades, incomes have gone up fourfold in the world's most populous country.

Sometimes more money just buys more unhappiness. Take China, for example.

Everyone assumed that people would get happier as their wallets got fatter. But a new study shows that the opposite occurred, at least for those at the lower end of the income spectrum.

Despite record economic growth over the past two decades – resulting in more than fourfold increase in income and spending – Chinese people overall have become less satisfied with life, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Incomes really did go up – even among the poorest segment,” says the study’s lead author, Richard A. Easterlin, university professor and professor of economics at the University of Southern California. “The staggering thing is that despite that, overall satisfaction failed to go up.”

Not only did satisfaction fail to go up, it fell like a rock in the early 1990s. Satisfaction slowly climbed back up after that but never to the point where it was at the beginning of China’s economic transformation.

Easterlin and his colleagues looked at two decades of surveys that included questions about life satisfaction. In 1990, those surveys showed that a large majority of the Chinese people, across all age, education and income levels, reported high levels of life satisfaction. A full 65 percent of those in the poorest income bracket reported high satisfaction as compared to 68 percent of the most wealthy.

By 2010, just 42 percent of Chinese in the lowest income bracket reported high satisfaction, compared with 71 percent of the most wealthy.

"Although a precise comparison over the full study period is not possible, there appears to be no increase and perhaps some overall decline in life satisfaction," the study says.

While many people believe economic growth leads to rising happiness, an entire field of economics has shown that happiness and wealth are not always closely correlated.

Part of the explanation for the unhappiness in China may lie in big societal changes that came along with the country's amazing economic boom.

“Here we have people who were basically secure about their jobs, their income and their retirement, and that all goes by the board," Eaterlin said. "So even though incomes got better, overall feelings of anxiety became much more severe and outweighed the material improvements.”

Beyond this, health care was no longer a right. As the system became privatized, fewer could afford doctors’ bills. So along with lowered satisfaction, people were reporting poorer health.

Easterlin sees this as proof that the road to happiness requires more than just bigger paychecks – especially if everyone is getting a bump in pay.

China might make its people happier if the country repaired some of its damaged safety nets, he argues.

But even with that, there might still be plenty of dissatisfaction.

The problem may simply be that people are more concerned about money now and more focused on “keep up with the Jaos,” Easterlin says.

What’s worse than being unemployed? Working in a job you hate.

A new Gallup poll finds that workers who are “actively disengaged” – that is, emotionally disconnected from their work and workplace – are more likely to rate their lives as poor than those who are unemployed.

The survey found that 48 percent of unemployed workers are thriving in their lives, compared with 42 percent of unhappy workers. Seventy-one percent of happy and enthusiastic workers were thriving.

The unemployed people also were more likely than the unhappy workers to report that they were well-rested, smiled or laughed a lot and experienced enjoyment.  

A higher percentage of unemployed and unhappy workers said they felt worried, sad, stressed and angry than those who are happy in their work.

Of course, in the current economy, many people might be willing to take a job they hate, and even risk some unhappiness at work, just because it comes with a paycheck.

The survey was based on telephone interviews of 1,266 U.S. adults, completed late last year.

BEAWIHARTA / Reuters

 Linda Carroll writes ...

Scientists have finally shredded the old saw about money and happiness. Apparently, money can purchase a whole lot of happiness.

After poring over data from 140 countries, researchers from The Wharton School concluded that the more money you have, the more satisfied you are with life – and that relationship holds true whether you are a citizen of the United States or of Burundi. As it turns out, the happiness effect isn’t relative; it’s based on a person’s absolute income.

What that means is that your happiness is very dependent on the economic prosperity of the country in which you live. As a general rule, the wealthier a nation is, the happier its citizens are.

Intuitively that makes a lot of sense, says study co-author Justin Wolfers, an associate professor of business and public policy at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Being from a developed country means we have a much easier life.

“We don’t have to worry as much about our kids dying,” he explains. “We’re rarely in pain. We don’t have to earn a living through manual labor.”

All of this makes perfect sense to Emanuel Maidenberg, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Satisfaction increases when you feel you have more control over your life,” Maidenberg says. “And you have more control over your life if you have more financial resources.”

Earlier studies on money and happiness suggested that people were concerned only with the wealth of their next door neighbors. So, if you were keeping up with – or better yet, surpassing – the Jones’s you were fine. By that logic, people in impoverished countries could be happy if they were just a little bit better off than those around them.

That conclusion was very appealing to people from prosperous nations, Wolfers says. “If you start thinking about the human misery in the poorest countries in the world, that’s incredibly depressing,” he explains. “The older research said that people got used to their poverty and so you didn’t have to feel bad as you drove down the road in your BMW.”

Wolfers and his colleagues also looked at changes in happiness over time. They found that, as a general rule, citizens of countries that were experiencing economic growth tended to become happier with time. But not in the United States.

Wolfers explains: “That may be because all the income growth went to the very rich. So only a small number of people got richer.”

This might be a good reason for nations to make sure they share the wealth. Perhaps if the standard of living in Egypt and Tunisia were higher, things would be quieter there.

Wolfers data doesn’t answer that particular question. But it might make an interesting line of research for the future, he says.