Despite the challenges and uncertainty created by the coronavirus pandemic in the last year, Finland has maintained its status as the happiest country in the world.
This is shown in the 2021 World Happiness Report, which was released on Friday. Among the top 10 happiest countries, nine were European.
Finland, in order, was followed by Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Austria, according to the report.
“Every year we find that the satisfaction of life is the happiest in social democracies in northern Europe,” co-author Jeffrey Sachs told The Associated Press. “People feel safe in those countries, so the trust is high. The government is considered credible and honest, and trust in each other is high. ”
Meanwhile, the US ranked 19th, down one place from last year.
The annual report is produced by the UN Network for Sustainable Development Solutions and ranks 149 countries based on gross domestic product per person, healthy life expectancy and residents’ views.
It also polls respondents, asking them to indicate on a scale of 1-10 how much they claim socially that they feel they have something if it doesn’t go well, their freedom to make their own life choices, their sense of how corrupt society is. and how generous they are.
The report typically includes data from the last three years of surveys to “increase the sample size and maintain lower confidence limits,” a press release said.
However, this year, analysts also made a separate list of the happiest countries, based exclusively on the 2020 results, to see how countries cope during the pandemic, apart from previous years.
Finland also topped the list, followed by Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Norway, New Zealand and Austria.
According to the press release, the report’s authors found that the most important factors for happiness were “people’s trust in each other and trust in their government.”
“We urgently need to learn from Covid-19,” Sachs said in a statement. “The pandemic reminds us of our global environmental threats, the urgent need to cooperate and the difficulties of achieving cooperation in each country and globally.”
“The World Happiness 2021 report reminds us that we need to focus on well-being rather than just wealth, which will be fleeting if we do not do a much better job of tackling the challenges of sustainable development,” he added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.