World Happiness Report 2023 33 intervals for the rank of a country are displayed to the right of each country bar.2 These ranking ranges are wider where there are many countries with similar averages, and for countries with smaller sample sizes.3 In the Statistical Appendix, we show a version of Figure 2.1 that includes colour-coded sub-bars in each country row, representing the extent to which six key variables contribute to explaining life evaluations. These variables (described in more detail in Technical Box 2) are GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and corruption. As already noted, our happiness rankings are not based on any index of these six factors—the scores are instead based on individuals’ own assessments of their lives, in particular their answers to the single-item Cantril ladder life-evaluation question. We use observed data on the six variables and estimates of their associations with life evaluations to explain the observed variation of life evaluations across countries, much as epidemiologists estimate the extent to which life expectancy is affected by factors such as smoking, exercise, and diet. What do the latest data show for the 2020-2022 country rankings?4 Two features carry over from previous editions of the World Happiness Report. First, there is still a lot of year-to-year consistency in the way people rate their lives in different countries, and since our rankings are based on a three-year average there is information carried forward from one year to the next (See Figure 1 of Statistical Appendix 1 for individual country trajectories on an annual basis). Finland continues to occupy the top spot, for the sixth year in a row, with a score that is significantly ahead of all other countries. Denmark remains in the 2nd spot, with a confidence region bounded by 2nd and 4th. Among the rest of the countries in the top twenty, the confidence regions for their ranks cover five to ten countries. Iceland is 3rd, and with its smaller sample size, has a confidence region from 2nd to 7th. Israel is in 4th position, up five positions from last year, with a confidence range between 2nd and 8th. The 5th through 8th positions are filled by the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland. The top ten are rounded out by Luxembourg and New Zealand. Austria and Australia follow in 11th and 12th positions, as last year, both within the likely range of 8th to 16th. They are followed by Canada, up two places from last year’s lowest-ever ranking. The next four positions are filled by Ireland, the United States, Germany, and Belgium, all with ranks securely in the top twenty, as shown by the rank ranges. The rest of the top 20 include Czechia, the United Kingdom, and Lithuania, 18th to 20th. The same countries tend to appear in the top twenty year after year, with 19 of this year’s top 20 also being there last year. The exception is Lithuania, which has steadily risen over the past six years, from 52nd in 2017 to 20th this year.5 Throughout the rankings, except at the very top and the very bottom, the three-year average scores are close enough to one another that significant differences are found only between country pairs that are in some cases many positions apart in the rankings. This is shown by the ranking ranges for each country. There remains a large gap between the top and bottom countries, with the top countries being more tightly grouped than the bottom ones. Within the top group, national life evaluation scores have a gap of 0.40 between the 1st and 5th position, and another 0.28 between 5th and Photo Yingchou Han on Unsplash
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQwMjQ=