Finland declared happiest country globally for sixth year: World Happiness Report

The country has received this prestigious recognition due to its exceptional performance in various factors that are used to evaluate happiness levels, such as high GDP per capita, robust social support systems, long healthy life expectancies, freedom, generosity, and minimal corruption.

On the occasion of the International Day of Happiness, on Monday, the World Happiness Report was published.

India has been placed 126th when considering the parameters of happiness.

The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network has released the World Happiness Report, which is built on survey information from people in more than 150 countries.

This year's list is similar to past rankings with many of the Nordic countries in the top spots. While Denmark is at number 2, Iceland is ranked number 3.

"The Nordic countries merit special attention in light of their generally high levels of both personal and institutional trust. They also had COVID-19 death rates only one-third as high as elsewhere in Western Europe during 2020 and 2021- 27 per 100,000 in the Nordic countries compared to 80 in the rest of Western Europe," the authors of the report said in the document.

One of the authors of the report, John Helliwell commented, "Benevolence to others, especially the helping of strangers, which went up dramatically in 2021, stayed high in 2022."

"Even during these difficult years, positive emotions have remained twice as prevalent as negative ones, and feelings of positive social support twice as strong as those of loneliness," the author added.

India, one of the fast-growing economies, was placed at number 126 in the report, below Nepal, China, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Both Russia and Ukraine experienced a decrease in their rankings due to the conflict between the two countries.

Russia has been given a ranking of 72, while Ukraine is placed at a much lower position of 92.

Afghanistan and Lebanon remain the two unhappiest countries and both have an average life expectancy that’s five points lower (on a 10-point scale) than the 10 happiest countries.

The top 10 happiest countries on the list are as follows: Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg and New Zealand.