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Did you know that you live in the 42nd happiest country in the world?
Great news, Earthlings! As a whole, you were 0.5 percent happier from 2010 to 2012 than you were from 2005 to 2007. That may seem like a negligible difference, but part of being happy is looking on the bright side, right?
This information on world happiness comes from the 2013 World Happiness Report, published by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Researchers studied data on happiness collected from people living in over 150 countries to discover which have the happiest — and unhappiest — citizens and to see how happiness has shifted around the world over a five-year period.
According to the 2013 report, the five happiest countries on Earth are Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden. This is despite the fact that these European nations all experience cold, dark winters. The U.S. ranked as the 17th-happiest country — slightly happier than the citizens of Ireland (No. 18) and a little less happy than the people of Mexico (No. 16). Americans saw their overall happiness drop by about 3 percent over the five-year period between surveys.
According to the report, Taiwan is the 42nd happiest country in the world, one place ahead of Japan but one place behind South Korea. China was more than 50 places below Taiwan in 93rd. The unhappiest countries in the world are the Central African Republic (No. 154), Benin (No. 155), and Togo (No. 156), which placed last.
To determine which countries are the happiest, the researchers asked an average of 3,000 people per country to rank their overall sense of satisfaction with life on a scale of 1 to 10. After analyzing tens of thousands of responses, the researchers identified six main dimensions to happiness: income, mental and physical health, social support, the freedom to make your own choices, being inclined to help others, and living under a government that doesn't seem corrupt. "There is no one key to a society's well-being, but these variables help to explain some of the differences in happiness levels between countries," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and an author of the report.
Although it might seem strange to try to measure something as seemingly abstract as happiness, Sachs pointed out that governments around the world have expressed great interest in the report. This is unsurprising as more and more countries have begun trying to measure the well-being of their citizens in recent years.
Happiness indexes are designed to obtain a clearer picture of people's general satisfaction with life by factoring in things like health, education, environment and safety as well as more traditional indicators such as income and employment levels. At the end of August, Taiwan's government released its first ever National Well-being Index, which used the same 11 core criteria found in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) "Better Life Index." According to the government, Taiwan, which is not a member of the OECD, scored a 6.64 out of a perfect 10, higher than the only two OECD members in Asia — Japan and South Korea.
The government stated that Taiwan performed particularly well in the "safety," "income," and "housing" indicators, ranking third, fourth and ninth, respectively. But the country fared poorly in the "environment" indicator because of its high density of automobiles, tying with Turkey for 35th place.
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