by Floro Mercene
The UN’s Annual World Happiness Report 2017 has named Norway as the world’s happiest nation. Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, with its population of just over 5 million, is one of the three Scandinavian countries in Northern Europe. Norway shares borders with Sweden, Finland, and Russia, and an extensive coastline facing the North Atlantic Ocean and the Barents Sea.
‘Oslo’ is a familiar name to us as in ‘Oslo paper’, which we use for arts and crafts. The capital Oslo is Norway’s largest city.
The World Happiness Report, first produced in 2012, ranks 155 countries by their happiness levels produced by creating average scores based on six areas for each country: income, life expectancy, social support, generosity, freedom, and trust. Norway was ranked fourth place in 2016, but jumped up a few place to become the happiest place on Earth this year. It is followed by Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Sweden.
While the top places of the list have shuffled around, the UN says, the countries that hold the top 10 places remain the same as last year. Of the top four, the authors say they are “clustered to tightly that the differences among them are not statistically significant”.
In recent years, Norway has repeatedly been ranked as ‘the best country to live in’ by the United Nations Human Development Report. This annual ranking is based largely on average levels of education and income, combined with life expectancy, but also factors such as human rights and cultural freedom.
Like Sweden and Denmark, Norway has grown to become a multicultural country. Today, a bit over 16 percent are immigrants or Norwegian-born to immigrant parents. Filipinos in Norway comprise expatriates and migrants from the Philippines and their locally-born descendants. As of 2014, there are approximately 20,000 Filipinos in Norway.
