Those looking for greater happiness and satisfaction in life should head to northern Europe, according to the 2013 World Happiness Report released on Monday by Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Egypt and a number of countries hit by the eurozone crisis, naturally rank last on the list.
Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden are the world’s happiest countries. This fact was revealed by a survey of 156 countries. Rwanda, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Benin and Togo — all nations in Sub-Saharan Africa — are the least satisfied with their lives, the 2013 World Happiness Report said.
The United States came in at number 17 in the world in terms of overall happiness, but it still lags behind Canada (6), Australia (10), Israel (11) the United Arab Emirates (14) and Mexico (16), according to the Earth Institute.
The report ranks the United Kingdom as the 22nd happiest country in the world. Other major nations included Germany (26), Japan (43), Russia (68) and China (93).
Advancing and Deteriorating
The global survey was conducted between 2010 and 2012. It is the second such report and follows the Earth Institute’s first rankings released a year ago. Overall, the world has become a slightly happier during the past five years. However, economic and political upheavals have resulted in significantly reduced levels of well being for some nations.
Rankings for Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain fell dramatically, because of the impact of the eurozone crisis. Egypt, Myanmar and Saudi Arabia registered large falls in the wake of recent political and civil turmoil.
Egypt had the greatest fall in happiness levels. On a scale of 1 to 10, Egypt averaged 4.3 in 2012, compared to 5.4 in 2007.
Angola, Zimbabwe and Albania experienced the largest increases across all the countries surveyed.
“On a regional basis, by far the largest gains in life evaluations in terms of the prevalence and size of the increases have been in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in Sub-Saharan Africa”, the report said. Reduced levels of corruption also contributed to the rise.
Governments seeking to improve the happiness of their populations should spend a higher proportion of their health budgets on mental illness, which is the single biggest “determinant of misery” in countries assessed, the study authors said.
“People can be unhappy for many reasons — from poverty to unemployment to family breakdown to physical illness,” the report claims. “But in any particular society, chronic mental illness is a highly influential cause of misery.
“If we want a happier world, we need a completely new deal on mental health.”
Gross National Happiness
The 2013 World Happiness Report comes on the back of a growing global movement calling for governments and policy makers to reduce their emphasis on achieving economic growth and focus on policies that can improve people’s overall well-being.
An idea first proposed in 1972 by Bhutan’s former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the concept of “happiness economics” has now gained traction in many countries across the world, including the UK, Germany and South Korea. The UN first encouraged member countries to measure and use the happiness of their people to guide public policies in July 2011.
“It is important to balance economic measures of societal progress with measures of subjective well-being to ensure that economic progress leads to broad improvements across life domains, not just greater economic capacity,” the report said.
