You may have noticed a new spring in your step and feel happy to be alive when you visit Costa Rica, where everyone smiles a lot, the food is good and life is pure and simple. If so, you’re not imagining it because it’s official! Costa Rica is indeed one of the happiest places on the planet. In fact, it was ranked as the number one happiest place on earth by an independent research group.

The New Economics Foundation, based in Great Britain, compiled and analyzed data into a “Happy Planet Index,” rating 143 countries based on the overall satisfaction of the populace, while also considering each country’s ecological footprint and life expectancy rates. Costa Rica this year came out at the very top of the list.
"Costa Ricans report the highest life satisfaction in the world and have the second-highest average life expectancy of the new world (second only to Canada)," the organization said in a statement. And like Canada, Costa Rica boasts universal healthcare for all its citizens, rich or poor. It’s no wonder thousands of people each year are now buying Costa Rica real estate, purchasing land in Costa Rica and vacationing or retiring in Costa Rica!

The study also noted that Costa Rica also has “an ecological footprint whereby the country only narrowly fails to achieve the goal of ... consuming (only) its fair share of the Earth's natural resources."
The Happy Planet Index is an innovative measure 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 with well-being to measure the environmental efficiency with which country by country, people live long and happy lives.

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.

For more information visit:
www.happyplanetindex.org
For news reports on the Happy Planet Index visit CNN.com and click on this link:
http://edition.cnn.com
You can also read the entire Happy Planet Index report at:
www.neweconomics.org