Costa Rica Ranks 3rd Happiest Country in the World

This year Don Edgar Cascante and dona Teresa Zuniga are celebrating 72 years of marital bliss. They were married September 14, 1935 when dona Teresa was just 16 and don Edgar was 22 and have nine children. They attribute their success to a lot of understanding and God.

It is hard not to correlate their success with the fact that Costa Rica is rated the third happiest country in the world according to the Happy Planet Index.

The index is published by the New Economics Foundation. It is an index of human environmental impact and well being. It was designed to oppose the already well established indices, gross domestic product (GDP) and the human development index (HDI), which do not take sustainability into account. Both of these indices do not take into account the fact that people’s ultimate goal may not be to be rich but to live a happy and healthy life.

The equation that researchers use when determining the countries happy index is:

                                     Life satisfaction x Life expectancy x ß
    HPI =         ________________________________________
                                              Ecological Footprint + α

The ecological footprint is defined as ¨how much land area is required to sustain a given population at present levels of consumption, technological development and resource efficiency, and is expressed in global average hectares(http://www.happyplanetindex.org/ecological-footprint.htm)¨

Costa Rica ranks third in this index with 66 points right after Vanuatu (68.2 points) and Colombia (67.2 points). The United Kingdom is 108th with 40.3 points, Canada is 11th with 39.8 points, and the United States ranks 150th with 28.8 points. The index sites 178 countries and the point system is out of 100, obviously the higher the better.

Some believe the reason for the Costa Rica to rank so high is the life expectancy which was 78.8 in 2006. In fact most Central American countries have a relatively high life expectancy and high life satisfaction. The countries in the region also have an ecological footprint that is below its globally equitable share.

For more information on the Happy Planet Index visit: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/index.htm

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