Students at the Le Hong Phong High School for the gifted in Ho Chi Minh City.

Vietnam is the fifth happiest country on earth and the happiest in East Asia, a British non-governmental group announced last weekend.

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) looked at 143 countries that are home to 99 percent of the world’s population after devising an equation that weighed life expectancy and people’s happiness against their ecological footprint.

The foundation found Vietnamese people have a life expectancy of 73.7 years and 65 percent of the country’s residents say they’re happy and satisfied with their lives.

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) found Latin American countries occupy nine of the top 10 spots with Costa Rica ranked the happiest and greenest place on earth.

Scores range from 0 to 100 – with high scores achieved by meeting all three targets embodied in the index – high life expectancy, high life satisfaction, and a low ecological footprint.

The ecological footprint is a measure of the amount of land needed to provide for an individual’s resource requirements plus the amount of vegetated land to absorb all their CO2 emissions and the CO2 emissions embodied in the products they consume.

Thus, the index indicates the degree to which long and happy lives are achieved per unit of environmental impact.

In the East Asia region, the Philippines was ranked behind Vietnam at rank 14, while other, more developed countries and territories of the region including Japan and Hong Kong only made it to 75th and 84th spots respectively.

Nic Marks of NEF said the HPI initiative, first released in 2006, aims to create a strong economy based on minimal environmental impact before wasteful lifestyles push humans to the crisis of climate change, the online newspaper Vnexpress said Monday.

HPI measures people’s well-being in terms of long, happy and meaningful lives in accordance with the rate of resource consumption. It is based on the concept that a successful society is “one that can support good lives that doesn’t cost the Earth.”

An NEF study in 2006 announced Vanuatu was the world’s happiest nation, putting Costa Rica in second place.

Source: Thanh Nien