COPENHAGEN: Finland has been ranked as the country with the happiest population in the world for the seventh year in a row, according to the World Happiness Report published on Wednesday to mark International Day of Happiness.
In the report, a partnership between pollster Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, researchers analysed the period between 2021 and 2023.
The Nordic countries were all in the top 10, with Finland followed by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden. Norway came in seventh.
Israel was a Mediterranean outlier, sitting amidst the Northern Europeans in fifth place ahead of the Netherlands.
Germany, on the other hand, made a significant downward slide, from 16th to 24th place. None of the largest countries made the top 20, with the US falling to 23rd place from 15th last year.
The ranking includes 143 countries. The happiness researchers did not go into detail in the report about what exactly makes the Finns happier than all other nations in the world.
However, they did identify a number of key factors that generally make people happier, such as social support, income, freedom and the absence of corruption.
"It's not necessarily happiness in the sense of jumping up and down, of joy in the moment. It's more a feeling of contentment. I think that's an important point," Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, one of the authors of the World Happiness Report, told DPA.
The fact is that people in the Scandinavian countries rate their own lives very highly on these points and are satisfied.
"What really characterizes them is social support and trust," said De Neve, with social cohesion particularly key.
Catarina Lachmund, a senior analyst at the Institute for Happiness Research in Denmark, told DPA: "What all Scandinavian or Nordic countries have in common is that they have very small populations that are very down-to-earth." She agreed that happiness can be defined as contentment. Denmark has also repeatedly made it to the top of the rankings, most recently taking the top spot in 2016.
Finnish psychologist Frank Martela explained why Finland is first.
"One factor is that the government functions effectively, but above all that it is actually able to be there for the citizens," he said.
Global inequality in happiness has increased by more than 20% in all regions and age groups over the past 12 years. according to the World Happiness Report. The unhappiest country on its list is Afghanistan.
There is a difference of around 6 points on the average happiness scale of 0 to 10 between Finland (7.7) and Afghanistan (1.7).
