The world’s happiest countries report calls attention to youth well-being

The world’s happiest countries report calls attention to youth well-being

By Claire Cameron edited by Clara Moskowitz

The world’s happiest countries tend to be Nordic and healthy and to have a higher degree of freedom and less inequality. Yet young people in certain regions may be experiencing a decline in well-being. That’s the big takeaway of the 2026 World Happiness Report, an annual barometer of global well-being from the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup and other organizations.

Finland is the world’s happiest country, according to the report, with Iceland, Denmark, Costa Rica and Sweden rounding out the top five. The report defines well-being as a combination of life evaluations, positive emotions, and negative emotions and measures it through survey responses, while the happiness ranking is constructed using life evaluations only.

The report emphasized the role of social media use in happiness: adolescents living in 43 countries who ranked high on a measure of problematic social media use tended to have lower well-being scores. Importantly, the report cannot conclude that using social media causes well-being to decline, and experts say its effects on youth are complex. For example, other research suggests higher levels of social media use could boost empathy in some children.

The report also found that negative emotions have declined over time among most young people, with some notable regional exceptions. “In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago,” the report authors stated. But overall, the global findings jibe with other research that has demonstrated that young people today have been showing many positive trends, including a tendency to be more empathetic, less narcissistic, more inclusive and even more patient than past generations.

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The report’s happiness rankings are based on Gallup World Poll survey respondents’ answers to this question: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

Of course, happiness and well-being are more subjective and nuanced than these rankings can show. The Gallup World Poll surveys people in more than 140 countries and includes both in-person interviews and telephone interviews, usually conducted with at least 1,000 people per country. The findings therefore offer a snapshot of global well-being but can’t show why individuals living in any given country report a higher level of well-being than those in another.

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