Denmark’s reign as the happiest nation on Earth has been usurped by Switzerland, but the Nordic nations still take up half of the top 10 places on an exhaustive and increasingly influential index of global well-being.
In the third World Happiness Report, now encompassing 158 nations, Denmark has slipped to third, behind both Switzerland and Iceland, with Norway, Finland and Sweden also near the top. The UK is 21st, one place higher than the second edition, in 2013.
The study, edited by a group of international academics, including celebrated US economist Jeffrey Sachs and Richard Layard, head of the Well-Being Programme at the London School of Economics, ranks countries by a series of factors, some nationally determined, for example GDP per capita and healthy life expectancy. Others are worked out through information gathered via the Gallup World Poll, a vast system of surveys that began in 2005 and now cover more than 160 countries.
The latest index offers few surprises, with the top nations — the first five are Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Canada — also ranking among the world’s wealthier countries. Similarly, the bottom five — Togo, Burundi, Syria, Benin and Rwanda — have well-documented problems of unrest and extreme poverty, although the Palestinian Territories are ranked perhaps slightly higher than you might expect, at 108. The US is 15th, with New Zealand ninth and Australia 10th.
However, the 172-page study also crunches the data in ways that give less expected results, including a table that shows which nations have seen the biggest increase or decline in happiness between 2005 and 2007 and between 2012 and last year.
It found that, while the ravages of recession often had a significant effect, it was by no means uniform, something the authors put down to how well the wider social fabric of a nation coped with economic turmoil.
Thus, Greece, where the recession was accompanied by social unrest and a wider questioning of national values, is seen as having declined the most in happiness over the period, with Italy and Spain also near the bottom.
In contrast, Ireland and Iceland appear to have suffered less, with the latter now ranked the second-happiest nation in the world.
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