Finland has defended its title as the happiest country in the world through a pandemic year, with people’s trust in each other and their government proving to be a key factor.
It is the fourth consecutive trophy for the Nordic country World Happiness Report 2021 published on Friday by the United Nations Network for Sustainable Development Solutions.
As the pandemic turned upside down 2020, the report offered two rankings: the usual one based on the average of three years of surveys conducted in 2018-2020 by Gallup and another focused only on 2020 to help understand the effect of the outbreak on the subjective good. -the condition – and how the factors that contribute to well-being have affected the results of the pandemic.
Happiness and difficulty
Europe tops the list in a pandemic year, with the US following Costa Rica
Source: World Happiness Report
Trust has been the key factor linking Covid-19’s happiness and successful strategies, in which companies with greater trust in public institutions and higher income equality have been all the more successful in fighting the virus.
Finland has so far withstood the pandemic better than most countries, avoiding blockages that have reduced life satisfaction around the globe. Hospitals were not overwhelmed and managed to keep deaths below 150 to 1 million people, compared to the global average of about 980. Denmark, which ranked second, also suffered a relatively good pandemic.
The United States fell one place to number 19, five behind Canada and three behind the developing country of Costa Rica, while the people of Afghanistan remained the least happy.
Happiness dashboard
The gap between the upper and lower countries has widened amid the pandemic
Source: World Happiness Report
The two classification methods used this time show that the changes in the overall scores were modest, “reflecting both the global nature of the pandemic and a widespread resistance to it”.
For example, the top 10 of the two methods used divided nine nations: Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and Austria.
“We need to focus on well-being rather than just wealth, which will really be fleeting if we don’t do a much better job of tackling the challenges of sustainable development,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. “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. We urgently need to learn from Covid-19. ”
– With the assistance of Zoe Schneeweiss