In our prior article, we kicked off a discussion about world happiness by reviewing a study Gallup released a few months ago. Today, we’ll take a different view of happiness through the lens of a Dutch professor.
The World Database of Happiness was developed by Dr. Ruut Veenhoven, emeritus professor of social conditions for human happiness at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. (What a great title!)
Professor Veenhoven compiles results from a number of studies for his database of 149 countries. The information is updated continuously and is available on his website when you search by country. The list of country scores is based on 10-year periods, which are renewed every five years.
Latin America topped the list once again in this world happiness report, but collectively did not do as well as the Gallup study we reported on in our first blog. This time Scandinavian countries were dominant. Sunny Costa Rica came out on top of this list, followed by Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Norway, Mexico, Finland, Sweden, Panama (#1 in Gallup’s study) and Canada. It seems that people can be happy even when their toes are frozen.
The dreaded bottom 10 countries, where happiness is hard to find, is made up entirely of African nations and an island off the east coast of Africa. Togo is at the very bottom and joined there by Tanzania, Burundi, Benin, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Congo, Kenya, Madagascar and Mozambique.
We also took a look at what Professor Veenhoven calls the Average Happiness in Nations trend, which shows how much people like the life they live. The trends are measured over a 37-year period from 1973 to 2010. The three big winners with the most significant increases were Italy, Denmark and France, all gastronomic destinations. I’m guessing that a well-fed nation is a happy nation.
Next time we’ll look at the Happy Planet Index.
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