Despite a tough time for the oil and gas industry and an ongoing scandal in the country’s politics, Malaysians are happier this year than the year before, according to the latest World Happiness Report.
Malaysia has been ranked as the 47th happiest country in the world which is an improvement from last year when Malaysia was ranked 61, the score moving up from 5.77 to 6.0. This moves the country up 14 spots to 47th out of 157 countries.
The World Happiness Report (WHR) is an analysis of personal life evaluations gather via the examination of six variables including:
- GDP per capita
- healthy years of life expectancy
- social support (as measured by having someone to count on in times of trouble)
- trust (as measured by a perceived absence of corruption in government and business)
- perceived freedom to make life decisions,
- generosity (as measured by recent donations, adjusted for differences in income)
Based on this report commissioned by the UN, the Danish and Swiss are the happiest people on Earth, scoring 7.52 and 7.50 respectively, while the country with the lowest score of 2.9 is Burundi.
This jump in perceived happiness may come as a surprise considering the current economic situation and volatile political climate that is shrouded in scandals. Are Malaysians somehow happy being stressed out? Or are we happier despite the grim state of affairs?
Perhaps the inevitable growth of GDP per capita and life expectancy balanced out the scores on perceptions of corruption. Or perhaps the actual day-to-day life of most of us living here – including delicious food and great weather – is enough to make anyone smile?
Gallup also recently released a report on how the world is feeling in the form of their 2016 Global Emotions Report. This report differs with the WHR on the methodology of measuring happiness.
While WHR looks at how people perceive their lives and socio-economic factors, the Gallup report looks at how people live their lives, measuring daily positive and negative experiences instead, and according to Gallup, over 70% people surveyed reported experiencing a lot of enjoyment, laugher and smiles.
Latin Americans are currently the happiest people in the world according to Gallup, with Latin American countries dominating the top 10 list of countries that have the highest daily positive experiences – Indonesia and Switzerland are the only two other countries on the top 10.
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