Finland remains in the top position as the happiest country in the world for the sixth year in a row.
Lithuania is the only new country in the top twenty, up more than 30 places since 2017.
War-torn Afghanistan and Lebanon remain the two unhappiest countries in the survey, with average life evaluations more than five points lower (on a scale running from 0 to 10) than in the ten happiest countries.
The top ten happiest countries in the world:
- Finland
- Denmark
- Iceland
- Israel
- Netherlands
- Sweden
- Norway
- Switzerland
- Luxembourg
- New Zealand
“Average happiness and our country rankings, for emotions as well as life evaluations, have been remarkably stable during the three COVID-19 years,” said John Helliwell.
“Changes in rankings that have taken place have been continuations of longer-term trends, such as the increases seen in the rankings of the three Baltic countries.
Even during these difficult years, positive emotions have remained twice as prevalent as negative ones, and feelings of positive social support twice as strong as those of loneliness.”
The report takes a closer look at the trends of how happiness is distributed, in many cases unequally, among people.
It examines the happiness gap between the top and the bottom halves of the population. This gap is small in countries where almost everyone is very unhappy, and in the top countries where almost no one is unhappy.
More generally, people are happier living in countries where the happiness gap is smaller. Happiness gaps globally have been fairly stable, although there are growing gaps in many African countries.
“This year’s report features many interesting insights,” said Lara Aknin, “but one that I find particularly interesting and heartening has to do with pro-sociality. For a second year, we see that various forms of everyday kindness, such as helping a stranger, donating to charity, and volunteering, are above pre-pandemic levels.”
Social media data has become a trove of information on how people behave. Since 2010, the methods for using social media data to assess happiness have become much more sophisticated.
Assessments can provide timely and spatially detailed well-being measurement to track changes, evaluate policy, and provide accountability. Together, these advances have resulted in both increased measurement accuracy and the potential for more advanced experimental research designs.
This year’s report also takes a closer look at the available survey data from Ukraine. “The devastating impact of the war is evident to all, and so we also find that well-being in Ukraine has taken a real hit”, noted Jan-Emmanuel De Neve.
“But what is surprising, however, is that well-being in Ukraine fell by less than it did in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, and this is thanks in part to the extraordinary rise in fellow feeling across Ukraine as picked up in data on helping strangers and donations – the Russian invasion has forged Ukraine into a nation” added De Neve.
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