Finland the happiest nation in the world, India ranks a lowly 125: Report
For the sixth year in a row, Finland has been named the happiest country in the world by the annual World Happiness Report. The report uses factors such as GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and low corruption to measure happiness.
India is ranked 125 based on various parameters of happiness in the report, which ranks global happiness in more than 150 countries. India is placed below Nepal, China, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Last year India was ranked 136.
Also read: India 136 out of 146 in world happiness index. But which countries are top?
The World Happiness Report is brought out by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and is released every year on March 20, the International Day of Happiness. The first happiness report was published in 2012.
Nordic countries on the top
This year too Nordic countries crowd the top spots. While Denmark is number 2, Iceland is ranked number 3. Sweden and Norway are among the top 10 countries in the list. Other countries in the top 10 are Israel, Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg and New Zealand.
Taliban-ruled Afghanistan has been ranked last and others at the bottom of the list include Lebanon, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“The Nordic countries merit special attention in light of their generally high levels of both personal and institutional trust. They also had Covid-19 death rates only one-third as high as elsewhere in Western Europe during 2020 and 2021 — 27 per 100,000 in the Nordic countries compared to 80 in the rest of Western Europe,” the authors of the report said in the document.
Satisfaction with life
According to the report, the natural way to measure a nation’s happiness is to ask a nationally-representative sample of people how satisfied they are with their lives these days. “A population will only experience high levels of overall life satisfaction if its people are also pro-social, healthy, and prosperous,” it says.
“Life evaluations have continued to be remarkably resilient, with global averages in the Covid-19 years 2020-2022 just as high as those in the pre-pandemic years 2017-2019,” report reveals adding, “There was a globe-spanning surge of benevolence in 2020 and especially in 2021. Data for 2022 show that pro-social acts remain about one-quarter more common than before the pandemic.”
Ukraine and Russia
Interestingly, Ukraine and Russia, both engaged in a war for over a year now, shared the global increases in benevolence during 2020 and 2021. “During 2022, benevolence grew sharply in Ukraine but fell in Russia…Confidence in their national governments grew in 2022 in both countries, but much more in Ukraine than in Russia,” the report says.
The Russia-Ukraine war caused a drop in the rankings of both the countries with Russia ranked 72, and Ukraine at the 92nd spot.
