This Is The Happiest Country In The World

Today is the third annual International Day of Happiness, a holiday founded by the United Nations in order to create “a more inclusive, equitable, and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes the happiness and well-being of all peoples." In honor of this auspicious day, Gallup Analytics conducted a study to see which countries are the happiest. Specifically, Gallup asked approximately 1,000 adults in each of the 143 countries selected whether they had “five positive experiences on the day before the survey.”  All in all, it seems that the world is much happier than we would have guessed. Gallup reports that more than 70% of those polled worldwide claimed they had "a lot of enjoyment, smiled or laughed a lot, felt well-rested, and felt treated with respect.” The results are especially interesting because even among the countries with the fewest people reporting positive emotions (Afghanistan, for example), a majority of people said that they smiled or laughed a lot the day before the interview. This is, perhaps, "testimony of the resiliency of the human spirit,” Gallup suggests. The overall happiest country was Paraguay, followed by Colombia and Ecuador. And, for the first time in the 10 years that Gallup has tracked the global Positive Experience Index, countries from Latin America snagged all of the top 10 spots. The country with the lowest amount of positive emotions is Sudan, followed by Tunisia and Bangladesh. As for the U.S., we placed 25th out of 143 — a ranking we can all be pretty happy about.