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A United Nations report determined that Finland is this year’s happiest country.
The results of the World Happiness Report are in and Finland is this year’s happiest country in the world. Norway, which was 2017’s happiest country came in second place in the 2018 UN report. Nordic countries regularly appear in the top five and this year was no exception, as Norway was followed by Denmark, Iceland, and Switzerland.
The World Happiness Report, which measures a country’s ‘subjective well-being’, was released by the Sustainable Development Solutions for the United Nations on March 14. This comes a few days before World Happiness Day on March 20, an event first proposed by the country of Bhutan in 2011.
The reports ranks nations on six variables that support well-being including income, trust, freedom, social support, generosity, and healthy life expectancy.
“The top five countries all have almost equally high values for the six factors found to support happiness,” said report co-editor, John Helliwell, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of British Columbia.
In addition, the report also found that Finland was home to the happiest immigrant, a unique focus this time around.
The Netherlands placed on the sixth spot this year, followed by Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia.
This year, the top 10 countries shifted spots compared with the 2017 report, however, none of them dropped out of the top 10 list.
About 156 countries are ranked based on their happiness levels and 117 by the happiness of their immigrants.
The 10 happiest countries were also 10 of the top 11 spots in the rankings of immigrant happiness with Mexico taking the tenth place in the immigrant happiness rankings. Mexico came in 24 th place in the overall rankings.
The UK and US came in at 19th and 18th places respectively.
Image Source: Pixabay
Rebecca McGhee
Rebecca McGhee is a valuable contributor for several publications and online platforms. Having graduates with a degree in Computer Science, her interest lies mostly in this area. Yet, she finds any tech-related topic or scientific topic is a challenge worth meeting. She enjoys turning her own research projects in worthy contributions that reach the large public. And mostly, she is grateful for all the feedback she receives from readers, as she believes it aids her in permanently improving her style of writing, beyond the scientific style she is accustomed to.
