Admin I Wednesday, March 20, 2024
BERLIN – For the seventh year in a row, Finland has been ranked as the country with the happiest population in the world, according to the World Happiness Report published on Wednesday to mark International Day of Happiness.
In the report, the researchers analysed the period between 2021 and 2023, evaluating subjective assessments of the lives of the population living in the country.
The Nordic countries were all in the top ten, with Finland followed by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden. Norway came in seventh.
Israel was a Mediterranean outlier, sitting amidst the Northern Europeans in fifth place ahead of the Netherlands.
Germany, on the other hand, made a significant downward slide, from 16th to 24th place. None of the largest countries made the top 20, with the US falling to 23rd place from 15th last year.
The ranking includes 143 countries. The happiness researchers did not go into detail in the report about what exactly makes the Finns happier than all other nations in the world.
However, they did identify a number of key factors that generally make people happier, such as social support, income, freedom and the absence of corruption.
“So it’s not necessarily happiness in the sense of jumping up and down, of joy in the moment. It’s more a feeling of contentment. I think that’s an important point,” Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, one of the authors of the World Happiness Report, told dpa.
The fact is that people in the Nordic countries rate their own lives very highly on these points and are satisfied.
Global inequality in happiness has increased by more than 20% in all regions and age groups over the past 12 years. According to the World Happiness Report, the unhappiest country on its list is Afghanistan.
There is a difference of around 6 points on the average happiness scale of 0 to 10 between Finland (7.7), the country with the happiest people and Afghanistan (1.7).
