Taiwan ranked 31st in this year’s World Happiness Report released yesterday, coming second in East Asia behind Singapore.
The annual report, launched in 2012 to support the UN’s sustainable development goals, is based on data from US market research company Gallup, analyzed by a global team now led by the University of Oxford.
People in 143 countries and territories are asked to evaluate their life on a scale from zero to 10, with 10 representing their best possible life. Results from the past three years are averaged to create a ranking.
Photo: Ritchie B. Tongo, EPA-EFE
Taiwan this year ranked 31st globally with a score of 6.503, falling from 27th in last year’s report.
However, it retained its status as the second-happiest place in East Asia, just behind Singapore at No. 30 with a score of 6.523.
This year’s report also looked at happiness by age, finding that Taiwanese younger than 30 were the 25th-happiest in the world and the highest in East Asia.
Taiwanese aged 60 and older came in at No. 34 globally, behind Singapore at No. 26 and China at No. 30.
The findings suggest that overall, young people are happiest in Taiwan, while older people are the least happy.
Outside of Asia, the index found rising unhappiness among younger people, causing the US and some large western European countries to fall down the ranking, while Nordic nations remained on top.
Finland remained in the top spot with an average score of 7.741, followed closely by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden, while Afghanistan and Lebanon held the bottom two spots with scores of 1.721 and 2.707 respectively.
In broad terms, the rankings are loosely correlated with countries’ prosperity, but other factors, such as life expectancy, social bonds, personal freedom and corruption appear to influence individuals’ assessments as well.
The US dropped out of the top 20 for the first time, slipping to 23rd from 15th last year, due to a sharp decline in the sense of wellbeing of Americans younger than 30.
While a global ranking of the happiness of those aged 60 and older would place the US 10th, under 30s’ life evaluations alone put the US in 62nd place.
The findings are at odds with much previous research into wellbeing, which found happiness highest in childhood and early teens, before falling to its lowest in middle age, then rising around retirement.
While the phenomenon is starkest in the US, the age gap in wellbeing is also wide in Canada and Japan, and to a decreasing extent in France, Germany and Britain, which all lost ground in this year’s rankings.
By contrast, many of the countries with the biggest improvements in wellbeing are former communist countries in central and eastern Europe.
Unlike in richer countries, young people there report significantly better quality of life than older people, often on a par or better than in western Europe.
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) today issued a sea warning for Typhoon Fung-wong effective from 5:30pm, while local governments canceled school and work for tomorrow. A land warning is expected to be issued tomorrow morning before it is expected to make landfall on Wednesday, the agency said. Taoyuan, and well as Yilan, Hualien and Penghu counties canceled work and school for tomorrow, as well as mountainous district of Taipei and New Taipei City. For updated information on closures, please visit the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration Web site. As of 5pm today, Fung-wong was about 490km south-southwest of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan's southernmost point.
UNILATERAL MOVES: Officials have raised concerns that Beijing could try to exert economic control over Kinmen in a key development plan next year The Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) yesterday said that China has so far failed to provide any information about a new airport expected to open next year that is less than 10km from a Taiwanese airport, raising flight safety concerns. Xiamen Xiangan International Airport is only about 3km at its closest point from the islands in Kinmen County — the scene of on-off fighting during the Cold War — and construction work can be seen and heard clearly from the Taiwan side. In a written statement sent to Reuters, the CAA said that airports close to each other need detailed advanced
Tropical Storm Fung-Wong would likely strengthen into a typhoon later today as it continues moving westward across the Pacific before heading in Taiwan’s direction next week, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 8am, Fung-Wong was about 2,190km east-southeast of Cape Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point, moving westward at 25kph and possibly accelerating to 31kph, CWA data showed. The tropical storm is currently over waters east of the Philippines and still far from Taiwan, CWA forecaster Tseng Chao-cheng (曾昭誠) said, adding that it could likely strengthen into a typhoon later in the day. It is forecast to reach the South China Sea
Almost a quarter of volunteer soldiers who signed up from 2021 to last year have sought early discharge, the Legislative Yuan’s Budget Center said in a report. The report said that 12,884 of 52,674 people who volunteered in the period had sought an early exit from the military, returning NT$895.96 million (US$28.86 million) to the government. In 2021, there was a 105.34 percent rise in the volunteer recruitment rate, but the number has steadily declined since then, missing recruitment targets, the Chinese-language United Daily News said, citing the report. In 2021, only 521 volunteers dropped out of the military, the report said, citing
RSS