The Danes’ 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 wellbeing.
In the third World Happiness Report, now encompassing 158 nations, Denmark has slipped to third, behind both the Swiss and Iceland, with Norway, Finland and Sweden also near the top. The UK is 21st, once place higher than the second edition, in 2013.
The study, edited by a group of international academics, including the 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 covering more than 160 countries.
The idea of assessing population by contentment rather than just wealth has proved influential, and is promoted by both the United Nations, whose Sustainable Development Solutions Network publishes the index, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
While the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan remains best known for its “gross national happiness” credo, David Cameron was another pioneer, in 2010 instructing the Office for National Statistics to collate data on contentment.
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 9th and Australia 10th.
However, the 172-page study also crunches the data in ways which give less expected results, including a table that shows which nations have seen the biggest increase or decline in happiness between 2005-07 and 2012-14. 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, the report notes, Ireland and Iceland appear to have suffered less, with the latter now ranked the second-happiest nation in the world. Similarly, the report found, people in the Fukushima region of Japan emerged from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami with higher average feelings of trust and wellbeing.
The UK was 70th in this 125-nation list, becoming just slightly less happy overall during the period.
The changes in happiness levels were significant, the report notes, with the top 10 nations gaining more average wellbeing than would be accrued by a doubling of per capita incomes, while those at the bottom suffered as much as if incomes had halved.
Speaking to reporters as the report was published, Sachs said that what he called “social capital” had as much impact as economics.
This partly explained the US’s relatively low ranking, he said, because rising wealth had been matched by lower levels of trust in government. “This is a point that I think is fundamental: we have to pay attention to the strength of society as well as the strength of economies when we consider wellbeing.”
The 2015 report is the first to consider the findings by gender and age. Women’s evaluations of their wellbeing tended to be slightly stronger than those of men – on average 0.09 higher on a 10-point scale – although there were some variations by region.
Differences by age were both bigger and more varied, with the overall picture showing the positive outlooks of younger people tending to fall by almost 0.6 points by middle age, then remaining flat. However, even these were tiny compared with the overall differences between or within nations.
Despite the greater average optimism of youth, a chapter in the report on mental health in children found 10% of people under 18 have a diagnosable illness, such as depression or anxiety. More than half of these will go on to experience mental illness in adulthood.
Layard, who led this section, said the findings emphasised the need to treat the issue seriously: “As we consider the value of happiness in today’s report we must of course also consider the need to invest early on in the lives of our children so that they grow to become independent, productive and happy adults, in turn contributing socially and economically.”