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 life 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.
Photo: Ritchie B. Tongo, EPA-EFE
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 bonds, 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 a par or better than in western Europe.
An undersea cable to Penghu County has been severed, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said today, with a Chinese-funded ship suspected of being responsible. It comes just a month after a Chinese ship was suspected of severing an undersea cable north of Keelung Harbor. The National Communications and Cyber Security Center received a report at 3:03am today from Chunghwa Telecom that the No. 3 cable from Taiwan to Penghu was severed 14.7km off the coast of Tainan, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said. The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) upon receiving a report from Chunghwa Telecom began to monitor the Togolese-flagged Hong Tai (宏泰)
A cat named Mikan (蜜柑) has brought in revenue of more than NT$10 million (US$305,390) for the Kaohsiung MRT last year. Mikan, born on April 4, 2020, was a stray cat before being adopted by personnel of Kaohsiung MRT’s Ciaotou Sugar Refinery Station. Mikan was named after a Japanese term for mandarin orange due to his color and because he looks like an orange when curled up. He was named “station master” of Ciaotou Sugar Refinery Station in September 2020, and has since become famous. With Kaohsiung MRT’s branding, along with the release of a set of cultural and creative products, station master Mikan
RISING TOURISM: A survey showed that tourist visits increased by 35 percent last year, while newly created attractions contributed almost half of the growth Changhua County’s Lukang Old Street (鹿港老街) and its surrounding historical area clinched first place among Taiwan’s most successful tourist attractions last year, while no location in eastern Taiwan achieved a spot in the top 20 list, the Tourism Administration said. The listing was created by the Tourism Administration’s Forward-looking Tourism Policy Research office. Last year, the Lukang Old Street and its surrounding area had 17.3 million visitors, more than the 16 million visitors for the Wenhua Road Night Market (文化路夜市) in Chiayi City and 14.5 million visitors at Tainan’s Anping (安平) historical area, it said. The Taipei 101 skyscraper and its environs —
Taiwan on Friday said a New Zealand hamburger restaurant has apologized for a racist remark to a Taiwanese customer after reports that it had first apologized to China sparked outrage in Taiwan. An image posted on Threads by a Taiwanese who ate at Fergburger in Queenstown showed that their receipt dated Sunday last week included the words “Ching Chang,” a racial slur. The Chinese Consulate-General in Christchurch in a statement on Thursday said it had received and accepted an apology from the restaurant over the incident. The comment triggered an online furor among Taiwanese who saw it as an insult to the
RSS