Vietnamese people have some of highest levels of week-being

Hanoi (VNA) – Vietnamese people have some of the highest levels of week-being in the world, according to the Happy Planet Index 2009.

The country ranks fifth out of 143 nations surveyed index and has an average
life-span of 73.7 years. Costa Rica reported the highest life satisfaction
in the index and is the only Asian country in the top ten. Topping the list are
Costa Rica , Dominican Republic , Jamaica and Guatemala .

Vietnam racked up 8.5 in the satisfaction in the world, with the
second-highest average life expectancy of the Americas second only to Canada
. The country’s ecological footprint only narrowly fails to achieve the goal of
“one-planet living”: consuming its fair share of the Earth’s natural
resources.

The HPI is an innovative measure introduced by New Economics Fund (NEF) that shows
the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered around the
world.

It is the first ever index to combine environmental impact will well-being to
measure the environmental efficiency with which country by country, people live
long and happy lives.

The index doesn’t reveal the “happiest” country in the world. It shows the
relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources
into long and happy lives for their citizens.

The HPI shows that around the world, high levels of resource consumption do not
reliably produce high levels of well-being, and that it is possible to produce
high well-being without excessive consumption of the Earth’s resources. It also
reveals that there are different routes to achieving comparable levels of
well-being. The model followed by the West can provide widespread longevity and
variable life satisfaction, but it does so only at a vast and ultimately
counter-productive cost in terms of resource consumption-Enditem