Lifestyle

Feeling happy? Not in South Africa

Staff Writer

 ·16 Mar 2016

The United Nations has published the 2016 update to its World Happiness Report, showing which countries in the world have the glossiest outlook on life.

The report is based on the assessment of 156 countries across a variety of indicators, ranging from GDP per capita, freedom to make choices, social support and life expectancy to metrics around generosity, perceptions of corruption and other positive and negative affects.

For the 2016 update differs, the UN also included inequality in the assessment.

“We have previously argued that happiness, as measured by life evaluations, provides a broader indicator of human welfare than do measures of income, poverty, health, education, and good government viewed separately. We now make a parallel suggestion for measuring and addressing inequality,” the group said.

Specifically, the report looked at the equality of happiness – the variation of happiness reported among a country’s population – and, rather logically, found that countries with greater equality, tended to be happier.

Overall, South Africa was ranked as the 116th happiest country in the world. The position was down from 2015, where South Africa ranked 113th.

Notably, South Africa saw the 14th-biggest negative movement in happiness over the past decade.

Globally, Sub-Saharan Africa is the unhappiest region in the world, with eight of the ten lowest scoring countries hailing from the region.

War-torn Syria and Afghanistan are the other two non SSA regions featured at the bottom.

Conversely, the happiest regions in the world are from the Scandinavian region, led by Denmark, which has retained its top spot once again in 2016.

These are the happiest – and unhappiest – countries in the world, according to the UN.

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