{"id":23954,"date":"2016-03-17T01:22:22","date_gmt":"2016-03-17T01:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/denmark-tops-global-happy-index-burundi-at-bottom\/"},"modified":"2016-03-17T01:22:13","modified_gmt":"2016-03-17T01:22:13","slug":"denmark-tops-global-happy-index-burundi-at-bottom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/denmark-tops-global-happy-index-burundi-at-bottom\/","title":{"rendered":"Denmark tops global ‘happy’ index, Burundi at bottom"},"content":{"rendered":"

{Denmark, closely followed by Switzerland, is again the happiest country in the world while crisis-torn Syria and Burundi are the most miserable, according to a global ranking released Wednesday.}<\/p>\n

The 2016 World Happiness Report seeks to quantify happiness as a means of making societies healthier and more efficient. The United Nations published the first such study in 2012.<\/p>\n

As with last year, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden round out the top 10, making small or medium-sized countries in Western Europe seven of the top 10 happiest countries.<\/p>\n

Denmark, which was ranked first in the 2012 and 2013 versions of the report but lost that honor to Switzerland in 2015, now reclaims its title as happiest country on Earth.<\/p>\n

Burundi was the most miserable, followed by war-ravaged Syria, Togo, Afghanistan and six other countries in sub-Saharan Africa \u2014 Benin, Rwanda, Guinea, Liberia, Tanzania and Madagascar as the least happy of 157 countries.<\/p>\n

The report compared data from 2005 to 2015 showing that Greece, which suffered enormously from the global recession and now faces a crippling migrant crisis, had the highest drop in happiness.<\/p>\n

The United States, where sharp polarisation has been exposed in the 2016 presidential election campaign, out-ranked several Western European countries to be 13th most happy nation, up two spots from last year.<\/p>\n

Germany was 16th, Britain 23rd and France 32nd. A string of Middle Eastern kingdoms \u2014 Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain \u2014 out-ranked Italy, which came in at number 50, and Japan, which took the 53rd spot.<\/p>\n

China, the world’s most populous country, was ranked 83rd and India, the world’s largest democracy, came in at 118.<\/p>\n

The authors said six factors \u2014 GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, social freedom, generosity and absence of corruption \u2014explain almost three-quarters of the variation across different countries.<\/p>\n

The report compared levels of happiness in 2005-2007, before the onset of the global recession, with 2013-2015, the most recent three-year period for which data from a Gallup World Poll is available.<\/p>\n

Of the 126 countries for which comparable data was available, 55 had significant increases in happiness and 45 had significant decreases, the report found.<\/p>\n

Among the top 20 gainers were Thailand and China, eight countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States and Eastern Europe, seven in Latin America, two in sub-Saharan Africa and Macedonia in the Balkans.<\/p>\n

The 20 largest losers of happiness included Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East; Japan and India in Asia; and Cyprus, Spain, Italy and Greece in Europe \u2014 all hard hit by the economic crisis.<\/p>\n

Ukraine, where the east has been roiled by a pro-Russian insurgency since 2014, has also fallen into the group of 10 largest happiness declines.<\/p>\n

Iceland and Ireland offer the best examples of maintaining happiness in the face of economic crisis due to high degrees of social support, the report found.<\/p>\n

\"Burundi<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{Denmark, closely followed by Switzerland, is again the happiest country in the world while crisis-torn Syria and Burundi are the most miserable, according to a global ranking released Wednesday.} The 2016 World Happiness Report seeks to quantify happiness as a means of making societies healthier and more efficient. The United Nations published the first such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[99],"byline":[228],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-23954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social","tag-greatlakesnews","byline-afp"],"bylines":[{"id":228,"name":"AFP","slug":"afp","description":"Agence France-Presse is an international news agency headquartered in Paris. It is the oldest news agency in the world and one of the largest. ","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":71}],"contributors":[{"id":228,"name":"AFP","slug":"afp","description":"Agence France-Presse is an international news agency headquartered in Paris. It is the oldest news agency in the world and one of the largest. ","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":71}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23954"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=23954"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=23954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}