Happiest countries in the world: How did New Zealand fare in the Covid year?

The coronavirus brought a year of fear and anxiety, loneliness and confinement, and illness and death, but an annual report on happiness around the world released today suggests that the pandemic has not crushed people’s spirits.

The editors of the 2021 World Happiness Report found that while emotions changed as the pandemic progressed, long-term life satisfaction was less affected.

“What we’ve found is that when people have a long-term view, they have shown a lot of resilience in the past year,” said Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, one of the report’s co-authors, from New York.

The annual report, produced by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, ranks 149 countries based on gross domestic product per person, healthy life expectancy and the views of residents.

Surveys ask respondents to indicate on a scale of 1 to 10 how much social support they feel they have if something goes wrong, their freedom to make their own life decisions, their perception of how corrupt their society is, and how generous they are.

Due to the pandemic, surveys were conducted in just under 100 countries for this year’s World Happiness Report, the ninth compiled since the project began. The index rankings for the other nations were based on previous data estimates.

The results of both methods put European countries in nine of the top 10 places on the list of happiest places in the word, with New Zealand completing the group.

The top ten countries are Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, New Zealand, and Austria.

That’s a slight slip for NZ, which was No. 8 in 2020.

It was the fourth consecutive year that Finland prevailed. The United States, which was ranked 13th five years ago, went from 18th to 19th place. Australia was ranked 12th.

“We found year after year that life satisfaction is reported to be happier in northern European social democracies,” Sachs said. “People feel safe in those countries, so trust is high. The government is seen as credible and honest, and mutual trust is high.”

Finland’s comparative success in curbing Covid-19 may have contributed to the lasting trust that the country’s people have in their government. The country took swift and extensive measures to stop the spread of the virus and has one of the lowest Covid-19 death rates in Europe.

Overall, the index showed little change in happiness levels compared to last year’s report, which was based on pre-pandemic information.

“We asked two types of questions. One is about life in general, we call it life assessment. How is your life going? The other is about mood, emotions, stress and anxiety,” Sachs said.

“Of course, we are still in the midst of a deep crisis. But the responses on long-term life assessment did not change decisively, even though the disruption in our lives was so profound.”

Problems affecting the well-being of people living in the United States include racial tensions and growing income inequality between the richest and poorest residents, happiness experts say.

“As for why the United States ranks much lower than other similar or even less wealthy countries, the answer is simple,” said Carol Graham, an expert at The Brookings Institution who was not involved in the report. “The United States has greater gaps in the happiness rankings between rich and poor than most other rich countries.”

People’s perception that their country was handling the pandemic well contributed to an overall increase in well-being, Columbia’s Sachs said.

Several Asian countries performed better than in last year’s rankings; China moved up to 84th from 94th last year.

“This has been a difficult period. People look at it further when looking for the long term. But there are also many people who are suffering in the short term,” he said.

Finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen, who was not involved in the report, believes that the Finnish character itself could help explain why the country continues to lead the index.

“I think the Finns are quite happy on some level of who we are,” he said. “We really don’t have to be any more.”