World Happiness Report 2024: Switzerland in 9th place

For the seventh time in a row, Finland is the happiest country in the world. This was revealed in the annual World Happiness Report released on Wednesday on the occasion of the International Day of Happiness. In the report, the scientists looked at the period between 2021 and 2023. Subjective assessments of the lives of people living in the country were assessed.

The top positions are again occupied by countries in the North. Finland is followed by Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Israel. Switzerland has now managed to break into the top 10 – in ninth place, ahead of Australia – and has slipped one place compared to the last World Happiness Report. That seems stable, but a further look back shows that Switzerland was still the third happiest country in the world in 2021, so it had to lose some ground in the meantime.

In the list, there are no big countries in the 20 happiest countries – so the US goes down: 23rd place instead of 15th. Germany slipped from 16th to 24th. The ranking includes a total of 143 countries.

The happiness researchers did not go into detail in the report about Finns being happier than any other people on Earth. However, they identified several important factors that generally make people happy, such as social support, income, freedom and lack of corruption. “So, being happy at the moment is not necessarily happy in the sense of jumping up and down. It's more of a sense of satisfaction. I think this is an important point,” said Jan-Emmanuel de Neve of the German Press Agency, one of the authors of the World Happiness Report. The fact is that people in the Scandinavian countries rate their own lives very highly and are satisfied with these points.

Global happiness inequality has increased by more than 20 percent across all regions and age groups over the past twelve years. According to the World Happiness Report, the unhappiest country is Afghanistan. Finland (7.7) and Afghanistan (1.7) are the happiest countries, with a difference of 6 points on the average happiness scale from 0 to 10. According to the World Happiness Report, Germany has a score of 6.7. From 2023, it was 6.9.