norway

A United Nations’ agency report to mark the UN’s Day of Happiness, has rated Norway as the happiest country in the world. By this rating, Norway has toppled her Nordic neighbour, Denmark from the number one spot.

Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and Finland make up the list of the world’s five happiest countries while the Central African Republic came last in a survey conducted on 155 countries across the globe.

On the whole, Western Europe and North America dominated the top of the table while sub-saharan African countries and those ravaged by conflicts had predictably low figures.

The United Nations’ Happiness report produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), measures “subjective well-being” –how happy the people are and why.

According to Jeffrey Sachs, the Director of SDSN and special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General, “Happy countries are the ones that have a healthy balance of prosperity, as conventionally measured, and social capital, meaning a high degree of trust in a society, low inequality and confidence in government.”

The report, which relied mainly on asking simple, subjective questions from more than 1,000 random people every year, used certain variables including social support, life expectancy, generosity, freedom of choice, perceived corruption and most importantly, economic strength, measured in Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Interestingly, despite the current economic recession, Nigerians are Africa’s sixth happiest people while Algeria leads the rest of Africa, followed by Mauritius.