The global feeling of happiness has remained constant despite crises. Finland remains the country with the happiest population, according to the World Happiness Report released on Monday. Despite the significantly worse security situation in Europe as a result of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and the fact that it has not yet joined NATO, the EU country took the top spot in the ranking for the sixth time in a row. As in the previous year, Austria came in 11th place.
Finland, the northernmost EU country, is followed at some distance in the annual ranking by Denmark, Iceland, Israel and the Netherlands, before co-NATO candidates Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg and New Zealand complete the top ten. While Austria remained stable in eleventh place, Israel jumped from ninth to fourth year-on-year. Germany, on the other hand, slipped down two places to 16th place. Clearly the unhappiest of the 137 countries surveyed are Afghanistan and Lebanon.
The scientists involved, who publish the report based on surveys by the Gallup Institute, calculate the ranking based on data from the past three years. They identified six key factors in happiness: social support, income, health, freedom, generosity and the absence of corruption.
Despite multiple overlapping crises, life assessments in most of the world’s populations have remained remarkably stable, the researchers wrote. In the years 2020 to 2022, which were strongly influenced by the corona pandemic, the global average values were just as high as in the three years before the pandemic. According to the report, people are generally happier in countries where happiness and well-being are distributed as evenly as possible among the population.
“Average happiness and our country ranking have remained remarkably stable over the three years of Covid-19,” said researcher John Helliwell, who was involved in the report. Changes in the rankings represented continued long-term trends, such as the improved rankings of the Baltic states of Lithuania (20th), Estonia (31st) and Latvia (41st). Even in these difficult years, positive emotions are twice as common as negative ones.
Ukraine (rank 92) and Russia (70th) are slightly higher in the new report than a year ago, even if the Ukrainian total – in contrast to Russia – has slightly decreased. “Despite the extent of suffering and damage in Ukraine, life appraisals have remained higher in September 2022 than after the 2014 annexation,” the scientists wrote, citing the year of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
According to the findings of the experts, this is partly due to a much stronger sense of togetherness and trust in the leadership around President Volodymyr Zelenskyj. Trust in governments had grown in both countries in 2022, but much more so in Ukraine than in Russia. “The Russian invasion forged Ukraine into a nation,” said one of the report’s authors, Oxford professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve.