Finland defended its title as the happiest country in the world through a pandemic-marked 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 in the World Happiness Report 2021 released Friday by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
As the pandemic began in 2020, the report provided two rankings: the usual one based on the three-year average 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. -being – and how the factors that contribute to well-being affect the results of the pandemic.
Happiness and difficulty
Europe tops the ranking in a pandemic year, with the US in Costa Rica
Source: World Happiness Report
Confidence was the key factor that linked happiness to successful Covid-19 strategies, where companies with more confidence in public institutions and higher income equality were more successful in fighting the virus.
So far, Finland has weathered the pandemic better than most countries, avoiding blockages that reduced life satisfaction around the world. Hospitals have not overflowed and have managed to keep deaths below 150 per million people, compared to the world average of about 980. Denmark, which has come in second, has also withstood the pandemic relatively well. .
The United States fell one place to No. 19, five points behind Canada and three below the developing country, Costa Rica, while people in Afghanistan remained the least happy.
Happiness marker
The gap between the upper and lower countries widened amid the pandemic
Source: World Happiness Report
The two classification methods used this time show that the changes in overall scores were modest, “reflecting both the global nature of the pandemic and a widely shared resistance.”
For example, the first ten methods of the two methods used shared nine countries: Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, and Austria.
“We need to seek well-being rather than mere wealth, which will be ephemeral if we don’t do a much better job of meeting 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 in achieving cooperation in each country and globally. We urgently need to learn from Covid-19 “.
– With the assistance of Zoe Schneeweiss