Jamaica recovers ground in happiness rankings
Leads the world in helping strangers
Published:Wednesday | March 26, 2025 | 12:05 AM
Jamaica leads the world with its ‘one love’ mentality, ranking highest globally in helping a stranger while climbing in overall happiness, according to the annual Happiness Report 2025 released last Thursday.
The Scandinavian nations of Finland, Denmark, and Iceland were ranked as the happiest overall by the report, produced by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. On the other hand, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Lebanon were described as the least happy nations.
The report assesses happiness based on factors such as income per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, perceptions of corruption, and dystopia.
Jamaica placed 73 in the world for happiness, an improvement from 84 a year earlier, according to the report authored by John Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jeffrey Sachs, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Lara Aknin, and Shun Wang. The report assessed six subcategories to determine the overall rankings: donations; volunteering; helping a stranger; a wallet returned by a neighbour; a wallet returned by a stranger; a wallet returned by the police.
In the subcategory of helping a stranger, the top five nations were Jamaica, Liberia, Trinidad & Tobago, Kenya, and Liberia.
“There are a few countries where the ranking for helping strangers is very high while the ranking for donating to charity is very low. Jamaica, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are in the top ranks for helping strangers but have donation rankings that are 80 or more places lower,” the report noted.
Norway led the world in the subcategory of a stranger returning a wallet, followed by Iran and Algeria. Jamaica ranked 81 in this subcategory but slipped to 103 when the question involved a policeman returning a wallet.
The report sought to explain the divergent morality of individual assistance versus institutional indifference.
“People generally want to help others and are likely to choose the best means available. Where institutional structures are weak, helping strangers in need probably represents a far more effective channel than donations to charities,” the report stated.
Stories from Jamaica reflect both selflessness and selfishness. In one instance, a returning resident shared how his taxi driver denied taking a wallet accidentally left in the backseat. A tracker in the wallet, however, led to the driver’s arrest. Another person recounted receiving his wallet back, albeit missing $200,000. Despite the loss, he expressed gratitude for the return of his credit cards and IDs.
Jamaica continues to export its philosophy of ‘irie’, popularised by the Rastafari movement and immortalised by the late Bob Marley in songs such as One Love.
Each of the happiness reports covers the prior calendar year, with the 2025 report, for example, spanning happenings between January and December 2024.
During the pandemic, Jamaica experienced a surge in happiness, to 37 globally in the 2021 report, up from 60 in 2020. However, rankings later slipped to 63 in the 2022 report, then to 68 in 2023, down to 84 in 2024 but recovered to 73 in the 2025 report.
The inaugural Happiness Report was published in 2012, with subsequent editions assessing happiness based on factors such as income per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, perceptions of corruption, and dystopia.
Regionally, the top five happiest nations were Costa Rica -6, Mexico -10, Canada -18, the United States - 24, and Belize - 25.