Zimbabwe has a Happiness deficit - report

Zimbabwe is nowhere near the happiest people on earth, according to 2018 World Happiness Report issued by a United Nations agency. Forget about the trade deficit, budget deficit, Zimbabwe has a happiness deficit.

The World Happiness Report measures "subjective well-being" - how happy people feel they are, and why.

Zimbabwe ranked poorly in this year's happiness index, which averaged rankings of happiness over the years 2014 to 2016. The country was ranked number 144 out of 155 countries in the world compared to position 138 in 2017, with a score of 3,692 points compared to 3,875 points in 2017 and was beaten by war-torn countries such as Iraq, Libya and DRC.

In Africa, Zimbabwe was ranked number 35 out of 44, and was beaten by Zambia, Mozambique, Sudan, Somalia, South Africa, DRC, Kenya, Uganda, and Angola. Surprisingly, Zimbabwe is ranked above Botswana, Malawi, Liberia, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Sudan, CAR and Burundi.

To explain happiness differences among countries, the index mainly looks at key variables such as GDP per capita, healthy years of life expectancy, social support, trust (as measured by a perceived absence of corruption in government and business), perceived freedom to make life decisions; and generosity (as measured by recent donations).



According to the latest World Happiness Report, compiled by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations, all these factors are key and measuring happiness is fast becoming a good measure of social progress.

Six key factors were measured to establish a global ranking of the happiest countries: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption.

Happiness is a better measure of human welfare than measuring education, health, poverty, income and good government separately. There are at least seven key ingredients of happiness: People who live in the happiest countries have longer life expectancies, have more social support, have more freedom to make life choices, have lower perceptions of corruption, experience more generosity, experience less inequality of happiness and have a higher gross domestic product per capita, the report shows.

Nordic countries regularly appear in the top five, while war-hit countries and a number in sub-Saharan Africa regularly appear in the bottom five.

Burundi was the least happy, taking over from the Central African Republic.

Some 156 countries are ranked by their happiness levels, and 117 by the happiness of their immigrants.

Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland were the other countries in the top five. The UK and US came in at 19th and 18th places respectively.

Togo is seen to be this year's biggest gainer, moving up 17 places, while the biggest loser is Venezuela, which dropped 20 places to 102nd.



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