Philippines inches up to 56th in global happiness index

The Philippines climbed one spot to 56^th in an annual survey that measures peoples’ level of happiness globally, but analysts said the ranking does not capture the social and economic pressures that Filipinos face today.

In the latest edition of the World Happiness Report, the Philippines ranked 56^th out of 147 countries, a slight improvement from its 57^th rank last year. The country had an average life evaluation score of 6.206 out of a possible 10, higher than the 6.107 score in 2025.

Among its Southeast Asian peers, the Philippines emerged as the fourth happiest country, only behind Singapore (36^th), Vietnam (45^th), Thailand (52^nd), and ahead of Malaysia (71^st), Indonesia (87^th), Laos (92^nd), Cambodia (121^st), and Myanmar (129^th).

The annual report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Finland (with a score of 7.764) was the happiest country in the world in its ninth straight year, followed by Iceland (ranking 2^nd, with a score of 7.540), Denmark (3^rd, 7.539), Costa Rica (4^th, 7.439), Sweden (5^th, 7.255), Norway (6^th, 7.242), the Netherlands (7^th, 7.223), Israel (8^th, 7.187), Luxembourg (9^th, 7.063), and Switzerland (10^th, 7.018).

Meanwhile, the unhappiest countries in the world are Afghanistan (ranking 147^th, with a score of 1.446); Sierra Leone (146^th, 3.251); Malawi (145^th, 3.284), Zimbabwe (144^th, 3.346); and Botswana (143^rd, 3.464).

The countries were ranked according to their self-assessed life evaluations averaged over a three-year period of 2023 to 2025.

To determine the ranking, the Gallup World Poll asked 1,000 respondents per country to evaluate their current life using the image of a ladder — with the best possible life for them as a 10 and the worst possible as a zero.

The research also looked into six factors — gross domestic product per capita, life expectancy, social support, generosity, freedom, and perceptions of corruption.

FILIPINO RESILIENCE

The slight improvement in the Philippines’ happiness index could be linked to “resilient” household conditions, supported by stable inflation and remittance inflows, Philippine Institute for Development Studies Senior Research Fellow John Paolo R. Rivera said.

However, these do not reflect ongoing pressures that Filipinos face, such as the high living costs and job security.

“While Filipinos report high well-being, many still face cost of living pressures, job insecurity, and uneven income growth,” he said in a message.

Jose Enrique A. Africa, executive director of think tank IBON Foundation, said the slight improvement in the Philippines’ happiness index could only reflect marginal survey variation rather than domestic improvement.

“The slight improvement likely just indicates how Filipino families and communities confront significant economic pressures. Strong kinship networks and community support mechanisms in play, as the last-resort welfare systems of most Filipinos,” he said.

Mr. Africa cited the Philippine government’s role in ensuring Filipinos’ happiness and well-being through improved public services, social protection, and job security.

“More than resiliency, national industrialization and rural progress are the most important economic foundations to keep improving well-being,” he said.

Leonardo A. Lanzona, an economics professor at the Ateneo de Manila University, attributed Filipinos’ continued optimism to its religious upbringing.

“Happiness may be ingrained but improved well-being measured in terms of longer life expectancy can be crucial. Compared to other countries, our access to better health and education facilities needs to be raised,” he said in a Facebook Messenger chat.

“Without these, reported happiness is just Filipinos adapting to hardships and doesn’t reflect genuine economic security,” Mr. Africa said.

Source: Business World

PH ranks 2nd in digital patience in Asia-Pacific

Filipinos are the second most digitally patient consumers in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a new study by customer engagement platform Twilio, which measured how long consumers are willing to wait for online customer service issues to be resolved.

The Philippines trails only Indonesia, with 76 percent of Filipino consumers saying they remain patient when dealing with automated customer service, well above the regional average of 68 percent.

This translates to an expected resolution window of 27.3 minutes among Filipinos, longer than the regional average of 24.4 minutes. In practice, the Philippines waits longer than any other market surveyed, with actual waiting times averaging 31.9 minutes.

“Filipino consumers are patient because they start with a deep sense of trust, but this trust is a foundation that brands must either build upon or risk breaking,” said Nicholas Kontopoulos, vice president of marketing for Asia Pacific and Japan at Twilio.

Despite these delays, speed is not the dominant concern for many Filipino consumers, the study found.

Half of the respondents said clear and easily understandable instructions were their top priority when dealing with digital customer service channels.

Data security and fast issue resolution were also important factors, with 41 percent of Filipinos saying the protection of personal information and quick service were essential to their trust in a brand.

Another key expectation is warmth in digital interactions, with more than a third of respondents saying automated systems should reflect the friendliness and empathy of human agents.

The study “Decoding Digital Patience” was conducted between August and September 2025 and covered 7,331 respondents across seven Asia-Pacific markets. These include 1,007 respondents in the Philippines.

Varying patience

Twilio’s study showed patience varies significantly depending on the issue being addressed.

Filipino consumers were more understanding of delays involving complex or high-stakes concerns, particularly in healthcare, where longer resolution times were deemed necessary.

Patience declined sharply, however, in routine and everyday interactions that fell short of expectations.

High levels of frustration were reported during telecom service outages (69 percent), cases involving incorrect or damaged items (68 percent), billing disputes (68 percent) and delayed or missed retail deliveries (66 percent).

Filipinos belong to one of the markets most exposed to artificial intelligence (AI) in customer service, with 81 percent reporting they have interacted with an AI-powered tool before.

Despite this high exposure, satisfaction among Filipino consumers remains mixed, with 42 percent reporting frustrations stemming from scripted responses, generic answers and unresolved issues.

As a result, 43 percent of Filipinos said they prefer to begin customer support interactions with a human agent, even if it means waiting longer.

Source: Inquirer

New Megacities Lie in the Path of Devastating Floods

Cyclone Ditwah brought Sri Lanka’s most damaging flooding in 20 years.

 Humanity’s future lies in some of the most vulnerable spots on the planet.

We’ve seen that in stark relief of late. A United Nations report last month concluded that the world’s population is increasingly crowded into a group of often low-lying, middle-income megacities in Asia and Africa.

Jakarta and Dhaka dethroned Tokyo’s long-held status as the world’s biggest city, with 42 million, 37 million and 33 million people respectively.1Mexico City and Sao Paulo were overtaken by Shanghai and Cairo among the global top 10. Bangkok, Delhi, Karachi, Lagos, Luanda and Manila were some of the fastest growing among metropolises of more than 10 million.

Many of these very regions have been hit by a devastating run of floods in recent weeks. The monsoon belt from Southeast Asia to West Africa is at the same time the swath of the globe that is urbanizing fastest, and the one where catastrophic rainfall is set to increase most dramatically. Nearly 1,000 people have been killed in a wave of storms that have stretched from Sri Lanka to Vietnam, with more than 442 dead in the north of Indonesia’s Sumatra island and at least 160 fatalities in southern Thailand.

Cities of the Future

The world's fastest-growing urban areas are mostly in Asia

Such disastrous events are hardly unprecedented. Most of our earliest civilizations grew up along inundation-prone river valleys, as evidenced by the near-universality of deluge myths. In the same rural areas of Southeast Asia that have been among the worst-hit by the rains of recent weeks, homes were traditionally built on stilts under steeply-pitched roofs to allow water to run away without doing harm. Local traditions often warn against building near wild rivers prone to bursting their banks.

The sophistication of this vernacular technology is under-appreciated, but — as with the more technical modelling that’s done to mitigate flash flooding in the modern urban environment — it’s inadequate to the challenges we’ll face as our planet warms.

With each degree that the local temperature rises, the atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture goes up by about 7%. That’s an immense amount when you consider that a cyclone can easily hold half a billion tons of water. Indigenous knowledge, like modern flood maps, is grounded in a historical understanding of how rainwater behaves — but the heating of our planet is making all those old predictions irrelevant.

The risks of this are greatest in the expanding megacities. The current rural population of about 1.5 billion will barely grow before heading into permanent decline in the 2040s, according to the UN, but two-thirds of population growth between now and 2050 will be in cities. About half of the billion new urbanites will be in just seven countries, most of them in the Asian and African monsoon belts: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Bangladesh and Ethiopia.

Unlike rural-dwellers who can often site their settlements in more stable locations, city migrants rarely have much choice about where to live. That’s why so many shantytowns are built on land previously neglected as too risky, from the landslide-prone hillsides of Brazil’s favelas and Venezuela’s barrios to the swamps that gave rise to slums in Mumbai’s Dharavi, Bangkok’s Khlong Toei and Lagos’s Makoko.

Unequal Burden

Source: Rentschler et al., Flood exposure and poverty in 188 countries. Nat Commun 13, 3527 (2022)

Precious few of these places have the sort of wealth to handle the engineering challenges of weather-proofing their built environment. Out of 1.8 billion flood-threatened people worldwide, just 11% are in high-income countries.

Unlike famine and infectious disease, tragic urban floods are rarely the result of absolute poverty. Instead, they’re most often the outcome of development that’s failing to keep pace with the problems it brings in its wake — cities whose allure is drawing people in so fast that infrastructure is incapable of moving at the same speed. The most damaging flooding over the past week in Thailand was in Hat Yai, a bustling tourist and shopping destination close to the Malaysian border that’s home to a special economic zone and one of the country’s busiest airports. In Sri Lanka, the fast-growing capital Colombo was worst-hit.

That puts a grave responsibility on municipal and national governments. All are counting on cities as the engines of growth over coming decades, but they’ll need to work hard in the face of natural disasters that will perpetually threaten to tear apart the urban fabric. The great centers of India, straining under water shortages and choking urban pollution, show what can happen to a country when urbanization starts to fail.

Bringing fresh water and global connections with them, rivers and coastlines have long been the lifeblood of the world’s great cities. As rising seas and devastating floods now make those same places increasingly unlivable, we must confront the possibility that these life-giving attributes could be their doom as well.

Source: Bloomberg