World Happiness Report: Where South Africa ranks
We’re a tough, resilient and adaptable bunch, but how does South Africa rank in the World Happiness Report?
Hakuna matata is Swahili for ‘no worries’, but do we take it to heart and how does South Africa rank in the World Happiness Report?
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Where do you even begin to measure world happiness? The organisation behind the reports says it uses four well-being indicators: life evaluations, positive emotions, negative emotions and the stable measure of quality of life.
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SOUTH AFRICA RANK IN WORLD HAPPINESS REPORT
The Gallup World Poll is the principal source of data. The best possible life is represented by a 10 and the worst possible as 0. This report is drawn from 1 000 responses gathered annually from each country. Weights are used to construct population-representative national averages for each year in each country to create the Cantril ladder (see below).
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When it comes how does South Africa rank in the World Happiness Report, positive emotion is taken as: laughter, enjoyment, and interest. Negative emotion is worry, sadness, and anger.
LIFE EVALUATIONS
The report explains that life evaluations differ more between countries than do emotions. They represent the widely differing life experiences in countries. Life evaluations more closely reflect the circumstances of life as a whole in that particular country.
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Encouragingly, positive emotions are more than twice as frequent (global average of 0.66) as negative emotions (global average of 0.29), even during the three post-COVID years 2020-2022.
WORLD HAPPINESS RANKING
Countries in Northern Europe rank tops, with Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland in the top six. New Zealand are the tenth happiest, Australia 12th, Ireland 14th, United Kingdom 19th. And you have to scroll all the way to 85th to find South Africa.
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Might we suggest those happiness ratings and positive emotions will shift markedly if the Springboks win the Rugby World Cup on Saturday? Of course they will!
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