Taiwan ranks 31st in world happiness poll

• By Kayleigh Madjar / Staff writer, with Reuters

Taiwan ranked 31st in this year’s World Happiness Report released yesterday, coming second in East Asia behind Singapore.

The annual report, launched in 2012 to support the UN’s sustainable development goals, is based on data from US market research company Gallup, analyzed by a global team now led by the University of Oxford.

People in 143 countries and territories are asked to evaluate their lives on a scale from zero to 10, with 10 representing their best possible life. Results from the past three years are averaged to create a ranking.

Taiwan this year ranked 31st globally with a score of 6,503, falling from 27th in last year’s report.

However, it retained its status as the second-happiest place in East Asia, just behind Singapore at No. 30 with a score of 6,523.

This year’s report also looked at happiness by age, finding that Taiwanese younger than 30 were the 25th-happiest in the world and the highest in East Asia.

Taiwanese aged 60 and older came in at No. 34 globally, behind Singapore at No. 26 and China at No. 30.

The findings suggest that overall, young people are happiest in Taiwan, while older people are the least happy.

Outside of Asia, the index found rising unhappiness among younger people, causing the US and some large western European countries to fall down the ranking, while Nordic nations remained on top.

Finland remained in the top spot with an average score of 7,741, followed closely by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden, while Afghanistan and Lebanon held the bottom two spots with scores of 1,721 and 2,707 respectively.

In broad terms, the rankings are loosely correlated with countries’ prosperity, but other factors, such as life expectancy, social obligations, personal freedom and corruption appear to influence individuals’ assessments as well.

The US dropped out of the top 20 for the first time, slipping to 23rd from 15th last year, due to a sharp decline in the sense of wellbeing of Americans younger than 30.

While a global ranking of the happiness of those aged 60 and older would place the US 10th, under 30s’ life evaluations alone put the US in 62nd place.

The findings are at odds with much previous research into wellbeing, which found happiness highest in childhood and early teens, before falling to its lowest in middle age, then rising around retirement.

While the phenomenon is starkest in the US, the age gap in wellbeing is also wide in Canada and Japan, and to a decreasing extent in France, Germany and Britain, which all lost ground in this year’s rankings.

By contrast, many of the countries with the biggest improvements in wellbeing are former communist countries in central and eastern Europe.

Unlike in richer countries, young people there report significantly better quality of life than older people, often on par or better than in western Europe.