Ireland ranks 10th in world wellbeing survey

A SURVEY of “global wellbeing” has found that despite our financial woes, Ireland has the 10th highest percentage of people who are “thriving” based on how they rate their lives and where they see themselves in five years.

The Gallup survey for 2010 classifies respondents’ wellbeing as “thriving” “struggling” or “suffering”. Results were based on face-to-face and telephone interviews with about 1,000 people aged 15 and older in each of the 124 countries surveyed.

People are considered thriving if they rate their current lives at seven out of 10 or above and their lives in five years as eight out of 10 or above.

The percentage rating their lives well enough to be considered thriving ranged from a high of 72% in Denmark to a low of 1% in Chad. Ireland came in 10th with a rating of 62%, beating the US (59%) and Britain (54%).

The survey found that the bulk of the 19 countries that could class themselves as thriving were in the richer nations in Europe and the Americas.

However, overall the survey finds that the majority of countries are not doing well. In 67 countries, less than 25% of people were thriving. Countries on this list hailed from all regions, but thriving was generally lowest in sub-Saharan Africa where no country had a thriving percentage higher than 19%.

Overall global wellbeing improved little between 2009 and 2010, remaining relatively steady when Gallup grouped all these countries into four major global regions: Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

In Europe, it improved by just 3% from 2009 (25%) to 2010 (28%). In Africa, 10% were thriving in 2009, compared with 9% in 2010. In Asia, the median remained the same at 18% in each year and in the Americas, the 42% thriving in 2009 was slightly ahead of the 39% thriving in 2010.

“As the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt showed earlier this year, leaders should not rely on GDP alone as an indicator of how well their countries and their citizens are doing,” Gallup said.