Despite the challenges and uncertainty created by the coronavirus pandemic over the past year, Finland has maintained its status as the happiest country in the world.
This is according to the 2021 World Happiness Report, which was released on Friday. Among the ten best happiest countries were nine European.
Following Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Austria were in order.
“Year after year, we find that life satisfaction is believed to be the happiest in the social democracies of Northern Europe,” Jeffrey Sachs, co-author of the report, told The Associated Press. ‘People feel safe in those countries, so confidence is high. It is seen that the government is credible and honest, and the trust in each other is high. ‘
Meanwhile, the US finished 19th, one place lower than last year.
The annual report is compiled by the UN Network for Sustainable Development and ranks 149 countries based on gross domestic product per capita, healthy life expectancy and the views of residents.
It also examines the respondents and asks them to indicate on a 1-10 scale how much social support they feel when something goes wrong, their freedom to make their own life choices, their sense of how corrupt their society is and how generous they are is. .
The report usually contains data from the previous three years of surveys to increase the sample size and keep the confidence limits smaller, reads a press release.
This year, however, analysts also made a separate list of happiest countries based solely on the 2020 results to see how countries are doing during the pandemic, apart from previous years.
Finland also tops the list, followed by Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Norway, New Zealand and Austria.
According to the press release, the authors of the report found that the most important factors for happiness were “people’s trust in each other and trust in their government”.
“We urgently need to learn from Covid-19,” Sachs said in a statement. “The pandemic reminds us of our global threats to the environment, the urgent need to work together and the difficulties of working together in every country and worldwide.”
“The World Happiness Report 2021 reminds us that we must strive for prosperity rather than just prosperity, which will indeed be fleeting if we do not tackle the challenges of sustainable development much better,” he added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.