The 2024 World Happiness Report also showed a disturbing downward trend in life evaluations by young people and adolescents, particularly in Western Europe.
Finland has been crowned the world’s happiest country for a seventh successive year in the newly-released World Happiness Report.
Compiled by using data from more than 143 countries, the report is published annually by Gallup, the United Nations, and the University of Oxford.
For the first time, the 2024 World Happiness Report has offered empirical data based on age, showing a worrying divergence in how happy young people are globally compared to older generations
How do you measure happiness?
The annual World Happiness Report rankings are largely based on subjective life evaluations compiled over the past three years from the Gallup World Poll in cooperation with the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
While the rankings themselves are based only on the answers people give when asked to rate their own lives, interdisciplinary experts from the fields of economics, psychology, and sociology are then called in to crunch the data and make evaluations based on six key variables.
The variables the report quantifies are income (GDP per capita), healthy life
expectancy, social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and freedom from corruption.
