-
Translated by: Flutura Gashi-Mehmeti
- March 20 2025 08: 59
- Share to:
The World Happiness Report 2025 ranks Finland as the happiest country in the world for the eighth consecutive year, with the US and the UK falling further down the list.
The report measured trust in people who were instructed to intentionally lose their portfolios, to see how many of them would return them, and compared that to how many people thought they would surrender them.
The number of portfolios returned was almost twice as high as people had predicted and the study, which gathered evidence from around the world, found that belief in the goodness of others was more strongly linked to happiness than previously thought, the BBC reports.
John F. Helliwell, an economist at the University of British Columbia and an editor of the report, said the portfolio experiment data showed that "people are much happier living where they think people look after each other."
He added that the study shows that people were "overly pessimistic everywhere," as more portfolios were returned than expected.
The 13th annual World Happiness Report, released to mark the UN's International Day of Happiness, ranks the happiest countries in the world and asks people to evaluate their lives.
Finland has once again taken first place with an average score of 7.736 out of 10, while Costa Rica and Mexico have entered the top 10 for the first time.
Both the UK and the US have fallen on the list to 23rd and 24th respectively - the lowest position ever for the latter.
The study, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, asked people to rate their lives on a scale of 0-10. Zero is the worst possible life, and 10 is the best possible life.
The top 10 happiest countries are:
1. Finland
2. Denmark
3. Iceland
4. Sweden
5 Holland
6. Costa Rica
7. Norway
8. Israel
9. Luxembourg
10. Mexico
The World Happiness Report 2025 also found that sharing meals with others was strongly linked to well-being across the globe, and that family size was closely linked to happiness, with four to five people living together enjoying the highest levels of happiness in Mexico and Europe.
