Moldovans unhappy like Africans

Moldova ranks 175, in a survey of 178 countries belonging to the British Leicester University, which had the aim to identify the happiest and the least happy nations of the world. According to the survey on the university’s web site, www.le.ac.uk, Danes are the world’s happiest people, because they are rich, healthy and educated. Burundians are the least happy, the survey has found. The research showed that that happiness was most closely correlated to health, wealth and education. Therefore, these indicators brought the people of Moldova (175) among the 4 least happy nations of the world, next to three African countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo (176), Zimbabwe (177) and Burundi (178). “There is increasing political interest in using measures of happiness as a national indicator in conjunction with measures of wealth,'' said Adrian White, a psychologist at Leicester University and the author of the report, in a note accompanying the survey. Ukraine neighbors Moldova in the cited survey as well, ranking 174. Moldova’s Western neighbors, Romanians (136), are happier than their partners on the road to the EU integration, Bulgarians (164), but unhappier than Hungarians (101), EU members since 2004. Russians are flanked in this rating by the African Kingdom of Swaziland (166) and Pakistan (166). The cited survey, to be published in a specialized magazine in September, has taken into account recent data of the London-based New Economics Foundation (NEF), but also 3-year old data of the UN Report for Human Development and UNESCO statistics from 2002. A similar research concerning the quality of life, cited by Info-Prim Neo in mid July, performed by NEF and called “The Happy Planet”, has placed Moldova on the 147 position, out of 178 countries.