For a seventh straight year, Finland remained the world’s happiest country in an annual UN-sponsored World Happiness Report published.
India ranked 26, the same as last year, in the happiness index. Nordic countries remained among the ten most cheerful, with Denmark, Iceland and Sweden trailing Finland.
Afghanistan stayed at the bottom of the 143 countries. For the first time since the report was published more than a decade ago, the United States and Germany were not among the 20 happiest countries, coming in 23rd and 24th respectively.
Costa Rica and Kuwait entered the top 20 at 12 and 13. According to the reports, the happiest countries no longer included any of the world’s largest countries.
Only Netherlands and Australia have populations over 15 million in the top 10 countries. Only Canada and the UK have populations over 30 million in the whole of the top 20.
Since 2006-10, the sharpest decline in happiness was noted in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Jordan, while the Eastern European countries Serbia, Bulgaria and Latvia reported the biggest increases.
Notably, the happiness ranking is based on individuals’ self-assessed evaluations of life satisfaction, as well as GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and corruption.
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