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Finland has a lot to celebrate. We in South Africa, not so much.
The Nordic country was rated as the happiest country in the world for the second year in a row, according to the latest World Happiness Report.
It’s followed by Denmark, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada and Australia.
South Africa drops in at 107 on the list of 156 countries surveyed.
No superpowers made it into the top 10 rankings. The UK came in 15th, Germany in 17th place, Russia 68th and China 93rd.
People in South Sudan are the most unhappy with their lives, as one might expect, followed by the Central African Republic (155), Afghanistan (154), Tanzania (153) and Rwanda (152).
Bolstered by population growth, overall world happiness has fallen over the past few years. There has been an increase of negative emotions, which were also measured, and include worry, sadness and anger.
The World Happiness Report was released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the UN on March 20, the date that the UN has declared to be International Day of Happiness.
This report is based on international surveys in which thousands of respondents were asked to imagine a ladder with steps numbered 0 to 10 and say where they felt they stood.
And it cites six significant factors which contribute to happiness: GDP per capita, social support, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and corruption levels.
“The top 10 countries tend to rank high in all six variables, as well as emotional measures of well-being,” says one of the co-editors of the report, John Helliwell, who is an emeritus professor of economics at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
The overall rankings of country happiness are based on the pooled results from Gallup World Poll surveys from 2015–2017, and show both change and stability.
The analysis of changes in happiness from 2008–2010 to 2015–2017 shows Togo as the biggest gainer, moving up 17 places in the overall rankings from the last place position it held as recently as in the 2015 rankings.
The biggest loser is Venezuela, down 2.2 points on the 0 to 10 scale.
Perhaps the most striking finding of the whole report is that a ranking of countries according to the happiness of their immigrant populations is almost exactly the same as for the rest of the population.
The 10 happiest countries in the overall rankings also occupy 10 of the top 11 spots in the ranking of immigrant happiness.
Finland is at the top of both rankings in this report, with the happiest immigrants and the happiest population in general.
The closeness of the two rankings shows that the happiness of immigrants depends predominantly on the quality of life where they now live, illustrating a general pattern of convergence.
Happiness can change, and does, according to the quality of the society in which people live.
The report ends on a different tack, with a focus on three emerging health problems that threaten happiness: obesity, the opioid crisis and depression.
Although set in a global context, most of the evidence and discussion are focused on the US, where the prevalence of all three problems has been growing faster and further than in most other countries.
Source: World Economic Forum World Happiness Report 2018
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