Expats might rave about the mild weather in the south of France or the outdoor lifestyle of Australia, but a new map has found that Costa Rica is the happiest place to live.
The research, which looked at 151 countries across the globe, put Vietnam second, followed by Columbia and then Belize and El Salvador, according to different measures including life expectancy, well-being and ecological footprint.
The map was compiled by the relocation website Movehub, using data from the Happy Planet Index, produced by think tank the New Economics Foundation. It calculates the happiness level of each country using an efficiency measure that ranked countries on how many long and happy lives they produce per unit of environmental input.
But some of the world’s high-income nations, while seemingly attractive places to live, were found to have considerably low happiness ratings, and the index report said that is because many of those countries have high ecological footprints.
But it may also be because the data does not take into account internal inequality measures and human rights issues tied to some countries that are high up in the rankings.
This may explain why so many South American countries feature in the top of the rankings including Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guatemala.
The UK comes in at 41, Germany at 46, France at 50, Canada at 65, Spain at 62, Ireland at 73, Australia at 76, the United States at 105, and Denmark at 110.
“Costa Rica's HPI score reflects a high life expectancy, high levels of experienced well-being, and a moderate ecological footprint,” the report says.
But it you look at the individual components, then the picture is slightly different. When it comes to well-being, for example, the top country is Denmark with a score of 7.8, although Costa Rica is second with 7.3.
For life expectancy, Japan comes out top with a score of 83.4 and Qatar tops the ecological footprint rankings with a score of 11.7, with the US in second at 7.2. Costa Rica scores just 2.5 in this section.
To calculate the Happy Planet Index, researchers multiplied the statistics for wellbeing by life expectancy and then divided this figure by the country's ecological footprint.
Happiness is gauged by a Gallup measure called the Ladder of Life, where respondents are told if there are 10 steps from the best life possible, to the worst, to imagine which one they stand on.
It should be noted, however, that the Happy Planet Index has been criticised in the past for bearing no relation to other happiness surveys and for implying, for example, that Burma is a nicer place to live than Sweden.
The research, which looked at 151 countries across the globe, put Vietnam second, followed by Columbia and then Belize and El Salvador, according to different measures including life expectancy, well-being and ecological footprint.
The map was compiled by the relocation website Movehub, using data from the Happy Planet Index, produced by think tank the New Economics Foundation. It calculates the happiness level of each country using an efficiency measure that ranked countries on how many long and happy lives they produce per unit of environmental input.
But some of the world’s high-income nations, while seemingly attractive places to live, were found to have considerably low happiness ratings, and the index report said that is because many of those countries have high ecological footprints.
But it may also be because the data does not take into account internal inequality measures and human rights issues tied to some countries that are high up in the rankings.
This may explain why so many South American countries feature in the top of the rankings including Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guatemala.
The UK comes in at 41, Germany at 46, France at 50, Canada at 65, Spain at 62, Ireland at 73, Australia at 76, the United States at 105, and Denmark at 110.
“Costa Rica's HPI score reflects a high life expectancy, high levels of experienced well-being, and a moderate ecological footprint,” the report says.
But it you look at the individual components, then the picture is slightly different. When it comes to well-being, for example, the top country is Denmark with a score of 7.8, although Costa Rica is second with 7.3.
For life expectancy, Japan comes out top with a score of 83.4 and Qatar tops the ecological footprint rankings with a score of 11.7, with the US in second at 7.2. Costa Rica scores just 2.5 in this section.
To calculate the Happy Planet Index, researchers multiplied the statistics for wellbeing by life expectancy and then divided this figure by the country's ecological footprint.
Happiness is gauged by a Gallup measure called the Ladder of Life, where respondents are told if there are 10 steps from the best life possible, to the worst, to imagine which one they stand on.
It should be noted, however, that the Happy Planet Index has been criticised in the past for bearing no relation to other happiness surveys and for implying, for example, that Burma is a nicer place to live than Sweden.