International Happiness Day 2023: Covid has not made people unhappier and UK makes top 20

There is reason for optimism.

Because the Covid pandemic hasn’t really affected global happiness, scientists have discovered.

Nordic countries again dominated the 2023 World Happiness Report.

While Finland was also named the world’s happiest country for the sixth year in a row, in the annual UN-sponsored index.

Scroll down to view the full ranking of the 137 countries involved.

Despite several overlapping global crises, including the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the researchers found that average life satisfaction between 2020 and 2022 was as high as it was in the years before the pandemic in most countries.

Interviews with more than 100,000 people in the 137 countries ranked also revealed that global well-being was significantly higher than before the pandemic.

The World Happiness Report, now in its 11th year, is based on people’s own assessment of their happiness, as well as economic and social data.

It assigns a happiness score on a scale of zero to 10, based on an average of data over a three-year period.

This year, the authors also used social media data to compare people’s emotions before and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Eight of the ten happiest countries were found in Europe, with Denmark in second place with 7.58 points.

Iceland, Israel and the Netherlands followed with 7.53, 7.47 and 7.40 respectively.

The UK dropped three places last year and is now 19th – with 6.80 points – figures also show, behind the US, who are 15th happiest country in the world and Australia 12th .

Lithuania is the only new country in the top twenty, having moved up more than 30 places since 2017, while France dropped out of the top 20 to rank 21st.

War-ravaged Afghanistan and Lebanon remain the two unhappiest countries in the survey, retaining the lowest positions, with average life evaluations more than five points lower than the ten happiest countries.

Sierra Leone also dropped to 135th place, becoming the third unluckiest country with 3.14 points.

“Mean happiness and our country rankings, both for emotions and life assessments, have remained remarkably stable over the three Covid years,” said John Helliwell, Canadian economist and editor of the World Happiness Report.

He added: “The ranking changes that have taken place are continuations of longer-term trends, such as the rises in the rankings of the three Baltic countries.

“Even in these difficult years, positive emotions remained twice as prevalent as negative ones, and feelings of positive social support twice as strong as those of loneliness.”

It is the first year that the ranking takes into account Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with Ukraine ranked 92nd and Russia ranked 70th.

Both countries shared the global increase in benevolence in 2020 and 2021.

But in 2022, benevolence grew sharply in Ukraine, but declined in Russia.

Despite the magnitude of suffering and damage in Ukraine, life assessments in September 2022 remained higher than in the aftermath of the 2014 annexation.

Analysts believe this is because Ukrainians are now supported by a stronger sense of common purpose, benevolence and trust in Ukrainian leadership.

The study is carried out by the UN-backed Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development.