Finland defended its title as the happiest country in the world during a year marked by the pandemic, with people’s confidence in each other and in their government being a key factor.
It is the fourth consecutive trophy for the Nordic country in World Happiness Report 2021 published on Friday by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
When the pandemic turned 2020 upside down, the report provided two classifications: the usual one based on the average of three years of research conducted in 2018-2020 by Gallup, and another focused only on 2020 to help understand the effect of the outbreak on subjective well-being and how the factors that contribute to well-being affected the results of the pandemic.
Happiness and Difficulties
Europe leads the ranking in a pandemic year, with the United States behind Costa Rica
Source: World Happiness Report
Trust was the main factor that linked happiness to Covid-19’s successful strategies, where societies with greater confidence in public institutions and greater income equality were more successful in combating the virus.
So far, Finland has resisted the pandemic better than most countries, avoiding roadblocks that have reduced life satisfaction around the world. Hospitals were not overcrowded and managed to keep deaths below 150 per 1 million people, compared to the global average of around 980. Denmark, which came in second, also withstood the pandemic relatively well.
The United States fell one place to 19th, five behind Canada and three below the developing country Costa Rica, while the people of Afghanistan remained the least happy.
Happiness Scoreboard
The gap between the top and bottom 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 resilience in the face of it”.
For example, the top 10 in the two methods used share nine nations: Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and Austria.
“We must aim at well-being and not mere wealth, which will be fleeting 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 of achieving cooperation in each country and globally. We urgently need to learn from Covid-19. “
– With the help of Zoe Schneeweiss