 Hello, good afternoon everyone and welcome to join our World Heart Report Asian lunch online events. Well, we're going to spend one hour here to introduce the main content of this year's World Heart Report. We also invite two panelists to discuss some specific area related to the happiness in Asia. Well, first let me give you a brief introduction about myself. My name is Shen Wang. I'm currently a Senior Associate Professor at Xianzhou Tong University based in Suzhou, China. I'm an editor of the World Heart Report and also a founding member of the report. I've been working with this report since the very beginning and mainly on the global ranking of the happiness by countries. Well, first I'll give you a brief introduction about World Heart Report and then I'll introduce the our speakers today. Well, the history of the World Heart Report can date back to early 2011. In that year, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution called unhappiness towards a holistic definition of development, which invites member countries to measure happiness of their people. And to use the data to help guide public policies. Right the next year. This was followed by the first UN high level meeting quote, well-being and happiness, defining a new economic paradigm, which was chaired by the UN General Secretary General Pankin Moon and the Prime Minister of Buddha. Well, the first World Heart Report were released as the foundational test, tax test for this UN high level meeting on April 1st, 2012. Well, this report aimed to come contain a collection of articles on the global and original distribution of happiness, the determinant of happiness and policy implications. Well, the funding editors include John Hallowile from UBC, Richard Laird from London School of Economics and Politics, and Jeffrey Sacks from Columbia University. Well, later the United Nations General Assembly decided to proclaim March 20 as the International Day of Happiness. So, since then, almost every year we will produce and release this World Heart Report. Well, now the current editorial team include John Hallowile, Richard Laird, Jeffrey Sacks, and also new members, including Yan DiNiel from University of Oxford, and Larry Eckling from Semaphresa University and also me. Well, this year's World Heart Report, we pay special attention to different age groups, in particular the old people and also the young people. And we can see a couple of chapters are discussing different issues relating with the age or happiness of different age groups. So, today, in addition to my talk on the global ranking, we also invite some other authors on the chapter to talk about specific topics. And first one will be Dr. Ryan Joe from Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge and master from University of Pennsylvania and a better degree from University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the understanding and improving well-being with a particular emphasis on child and excellent mental health and well-being, so she emotional skills and cross-cultural studies. And she's on the editorial board of many journals, including Journal of Youth and Excellence and Frontiers in Education. Our next speaker will talk about the happiness of the older adults in India. The speaker is Dr. Shobit Srivastava. And he's a demographer with a master in PhD in published studies from the International Institute for Public Sciences, Mumbai, India. His expertise lines mainly in analyzing the large data sets and over, he has published over 150 research papers in international peer-reviewed journals in a domain like general technology and nutrition and gender. And he served as a monitoring and evaluation expert at International NGO. And we have two panelists today. The first one is William Top from Singapore Management University. And he completed his doctoral in social and personal psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the multilevel process that underlies well-being. At the micro level, his interest in cultural similarities and differences in well-being, as well as the social level conditions associated with well-being. At the micro level, he examines daily fluctuations in emotions, satisfaction, and meaning, and how those fluctuations may influenced by personal personality, memory, and social interactions. He currently serves as a co-debutee and director of the Center for Research on Successful Aging, which manages the Singapore Left Panel. And our another panelist is Arthur Graham, who is a professor of well-being in public policy at Victoria University of Wellington School of Government. And he's also a senior fellow at Motor Economic and Public Policy Research. And he convened the World Webbing Panel in 2023. He was awarded the title of the Research Fellow on the International Society for College of Life Studies. Professor Graham's primary role included chairman, prayer will include chairman and chief economist at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the president of the New Zealand Association of Economics. And we're happy to have them on board to talk about different issues regarding happiness and well-being. So now I will hand the stage to Barry Graham to show the video, play a video from John Clifton of the CEO of the Calabasco Foundation, with the major data provider of our World Health Report. What is the happiest place on earth? Thanks to the World Happiness Report, we now know the answer. And thanks to Oxford University and the United Nations, this work has become famous. But what many don't know is that the voices behind it come from a global study conducted by Gallup. Our interest in happiness traces back many decades. Our founder, George Gallup, is best known as the pioneer of modern polling and the inventor of presidential approval ratings. But his insatiable curiosity took him beyond the political realm. In an interview with the esteemed journalist Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s, Dr. Gallup was asked, of everything that you've studied, what is it that interests you the most? His answer? Happiness. We've since put booster rockets on his original work and began studying happiness, well-being, and the essence of a great life across 140 countries. And to date, Gallup has surveyed more than 3 million adults in over 168 countries using more than 150 languages. Understanding the statistical landscape of life on Earth serves a critical purpose beyond mere curiosity. The absence of such data can have dire implications. Effective policymaking relies on solid data, yet there remains a significant lack of it in various parts of the world. Many existing global indicators, like GDP, only capture the economic dimensions of life, if at all. Today's World Happiness Report attempts to bridge some of these gaps by offering insights into people's perceptions of life on Earth. It offers more than just national rankings. It provides analytics and advice for evidence-based planning and policymaking. Our role in research on world happiness is a natural fit with our long-standing mission, providing leaders with the right information about what people say makes life worthwhile. Right, so I will talk about the Chapter 2 of the World Health Report. And in this chapter, we usually report the global rankings with some special focus in this year on the different age groups. So the title of this year's Chapter 2 is Happiness of the Younger, the Older, and those in-between. So I will briefly introduce the global rankings and then touch on some special topic on the age issues. Well, the content is mainly based on the Chapter 2 of the World Health Report, written by John Hallowell, Hai Fang Huang, and Hugh Shippett and me. Well, the happiness rankings are based on individuals' own assessment of their lives. In particular, their answers to the single item country letter left evaluation question on a scale of 0 to 10. Why? Why put this in the very beginning? Because there are always, in the past years, many reports which just misunderstood our happiness score. They said we just use some factors to construct some happiness indicator or happiness index. Actually, no. We just use the survey questions which based on country letter and we just simply average the data for the recent three years' data. So we do not construct the index. We just use the survey data. Well, this year reports show that there's a lot of year-to-year consistency in a way people read their lives in different countries. Because we can see that the top ranking countries are very similar to those in last year or the year before. Well, since our data based on the recent three years' averages, that's why we can see those kind of consistency. Well, we find that while the top 10 countries remain largely unchanged, there has been much more action in the top 20. That means there are some changes among the top 20 countries. For example, the United States just dropped from the top 20 countries. Well, this is the this year ranking while Finland still take the top spot, followed by Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Israel, and a couple of countries in Northern Europe and Northern Europe. Well, and we can see that actually there is no Asian country in this top 20 list. Unfortunately, however, we do have one on the top, that's in Singapore. Singapore has been ranking the most happiest country in Asia for the last two years. Well, this year Singapore is ranked 30s with a score of 6.5. It's not a bad one, however, it's still a little lower than the very top spot such as Finland, which have a score of 7.741 over 10. That's quite a high score. Singapore still have a long way to go to catch up with the most happiest country in the world. And another one in Asia, the second one Asia is Taiwan province of China, which is just very close to Singapore. And before to some 23 Taiwan has been amounted on the top in Asia, but now Singapore take a take their spot. Well, some other Asian countries followed by like Uzbekistan ranked number 47 and Kazakhstan ranked number 49, then followed by Japan and Korea. And then Korea are more advanced in terms of their income level or GDP per capita than like, you know, the situation countries. However, their happiness levels are not that high. Well, where's China. China is number, number 60. And it's scored very similar to talents, just slightly smaller in talents. Well, in the past, China was not as good as today, but in recent years, it's happy score has been increased a lot. That's why it's ranking are also increased. Well, these are the rankings on the top we can also see the most the least happiest country in the world. The one is Afghanistan, then Lebanon, Lesona and Sierra Leone, you know, those the least developed countries in the world, and also many countries of them are just facing some conflicts or walls there. Well, in addition to the global rankings which catch a lot of eyeballs. So, we can see that we also show that the ranking differ a lot for the young and the old, because there are so many details there I cannot show you here. But I can briefly talk about some countries in Asia, for example, in the case of China. The overranking is 60. However, the young people's ranking is much higher than that. I'm sorry, much lower than that, but older people have a much better ranking in China. And in the dynamics of the rankings we also see that the negative emotions in this year are more frequent than before. So that means there is a global writing in a worry and concerns. And the global happiness in quality have also been increased a lot in the past 10 years. So, look at the changes of happenings, we can see that a lot of gainers here, if you compare recently years with 2006 to 2008, like Serbia, Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania, and also China gains a lot. However, some other countries like Afghanistan, Lebanon and Jordan, they have seen a large decrease in their happiness. Well, given the time limit, I cannot talk too much details of there, but I would like to show the last slide regarding the dynamics of happiness in a few country nations in Asia. We can see that in India, I want to say that in India actually there are a lot of decrease in recent years up to, you know, the COVID-19 pandemic period. There are some other countries like Indonesia, Philippines and China and generally seeing the increase in happiness in the recent decade. Okay, so that's a very brief introduction to the global rankings chapter. If you've got more interest, please go to our website, wordhappiness.report and to find more details. I'll hand it to the stage to another quarter of the chapter officers. Over to you, Lane. Thanks, I am sharing my screen now. It's my pleasure to present this chapter, Child and Adolescent Welving, Global Trends, Challenges and Opportunity on behalf of my impressive co-authors, Jose, Laura, Leonie and Ian. We also want to use this opportunity to thank data providers and everyone else who provide feedback and support. Our chapter is the third chapter of this year's What Happiness Report. Before dive into the content of this chapter, I want to first emphasize that we only analyze adolescents data within the age ranging from 10 to 24. And we focused on child and adolescents' subjective well-being, which is how young people perceive and assess their own lives. Finally, all the tables and figures I used in this presentation are from our own chapter. My presentation starts from chapter overview that moves to overall findings, key insights that ends with call to action. A little bit of chapter overview. Our chapter aims to present a comprehensive analysis of child and adolescent subjective well-being, acknowledging the challenges posed by data limitations. We used four major cross-sectional data sets, their program for international student assessment, PISA survey, the health behavior in school-age children, HBLC survey, the International Survey of Children's Well-being, known as Children's Ward and the Gallup Ward pool. If you're interested in the service, the illustration on the left can be found in our chapter, and it includes the details about all these different data sets. If I want to use one sentence to conclude this chapter, that is, life satisfaction levels, trends and correlations vary across age, gender, ward regions, countries, and the levels of economic development. And the first findings that I want to share is that from Gallup data, we found that globally adolescents age 15 to 24, if you see the green line of the right, reports significantly higher life satisfaction than adults age 25 or above if you see the purple line. So in another word, life satisfaction gradually drops from childhood through adolescence into adulthood. Moving to the second key insight, we find that female adolescents start to report lower life satisfaction than male adolescents at around age 12, and the gap further expands between age 13 to 15. And later at age 15 to 24, we find females report higher life satisfaction than males when considered almost all countries. However, the first conclusion is based on, if you see the chart on the left, four regions of the world. They are Western Europe, Commonwealth of independent states, Central and Eastern Europe, and Canada only. So we don't know whether the first conclusion can be generalized to other regions of the world, for example, Asia. That's this lead to our next insight, data limitations. If we see the table on the right, you can find that availability of Asian, data availability among Asian countries and regions is very limited. Two primary shortcomings were reviewed in the current existing international data set of child and adolescence well-being. The first is data in early to middle adolescence age 10 to 15, it's only available in high and up middle income countries. Secondly, there is a absence of a standardized measurement of well-being. That's there is a global need for improving improving data collection and assessment to enhance child and adolescent well-being. And we believe the following first instructions can be the potential next step to help this process. First, for collecting international adolescence and child data, we need at least one standardized measurement of subject well-being. Secondly, there's a need for a broader age coverage from age eight to late adolescence and into adulthood. Certainly, we need more data from different regions and the special attention should be put on improving data collection in middle and low income countries. Here comes to the end of the presentation. I have only covered some key insights within our chapter and I highly recommend people who are interested in this topic to take a closer look of this chapter and the report itself. Thank you. Can you stop sharing, Mayin? Sorry. Yeah, our password to the house. Okay, Shobit, please share your screen. Good afternoon from India. This is Shobit and I will be presenting the chapter differences in life satisfaction among older adults in India. And firstly, I want to thank all my co-authors, Rona, Mansi Pai and Mohamed to significantly contribute in the chapter. Firstly, coming on to the significance of the chapter. So India's older population, second largest worldwide, with 140 million Indian aged 60 and over, which is approximately 9% of the total population as per census 2011. The average growth rate of India's aged 60 and above is three times higher than the country's overall population growth rate. While percentages of older adults may be much more in countries like South Korea and Japan, but the numbers are very huge in India. If I talk about the, what does the study add? The study aimed to find out the significant factors that contribute to the differences in the life satisfaction among older adults in India. And also what factors actually contribute for the variation in the overall life satisfaction score among older adults is the main objective of the chapter. Now, coming on to the data and methods. So we have used longitudinal aging study in India, LASI, which was conducted in 2017-19. It is a sister study of HRS. And largely the data collected in the LASI is on demographic data, the data related to health symptoms, conditions, disabilities, etc. The overall sample size of the data was 73,396 for the people aged 45 years and above. However, for the current analysis, we have considered only the population of 60 years and above, which is about 30,795 older adults as a sample. Coming on to the outcome variable. So our outcome variable was life satisfaction, which was measured using five questions. Each question having scale of 1 to 5. So we are, after having a composite score, we had a scale of 5 to 35. However, to compare it with the global estimates, we have re-analyzed the overall score and we actually made it from 0 to 10. And the overall life satisfaction score on the scale of 0 to 10 was 6.32 for older adults aged 60 and above using our LASI data set. Coming on to the statistical methods, we have used unweighted percentage distribution, bivariate analysis, one-way ANOVA, multivariate, multivariable linear regression analysis, and dominance analysis, which actually helped us in knowing what were the factors that actually contributed in the variation of life satisfaction score. So these are the overall demographic characteristics. I will just talk briefly about the health characteristics. About 25% of the older adults aged 60 and above were having multiple chronic disease. About 6.8% had depression. About 22% reported that their health was poor. About 20% reported difficulty in activities of daily living. About 43% reported difficulty in instrumental activities of daily living and about 74% of the older adults were physically inactive. Talking about the data methods. So the main findings I would like to show over was the figure 5.2, which actually talks about contribution of independent variables to overall variation in life satisfaction among older adults in India. So the variation was largely explained by living arrangement, satisfaction among older adults, followed by self-rated health, if they have followed by discrimination among older adults, followed by their level of education, and followed by their importance to religion. So these were the top five factors which actually explain most of the variation in the life satisfaction score among older adults. So this can be quoted as one of the most important findings from our study. Apart from that, the regression analysis shows that the oldest old reported a significantly greater likelihood of life satisfaction than their peers, that is young old and old old. And older women were having greater life satisfaction, the odds for high in comparison to men. That was the quite important finding from our study. Moreover, individual who reported satisfaction with their current living arrangement, who did not experienced ill treatment or discrimination, who were not depressed and who rated their health as good for having significantly higher likelihoods of having a higher life satisfaction score in comparison to their counterparts. Now coming onto the conclusion, the present study substantially contributes to the literature on later life subjective well-being in India, and we do so by employing a sizable heterogeneous nationally representative sample of older Indians. We found that older women, those in the higher age groups currently married and those who were educated reported higher life satisfaction than their counterparts. Lower satisfaction with the living arrangement, perceived discrimination and poor self-rated help were important factors associated with the low satisfaction life satisfaction score among older Indians. Findings of the study indicates that strengthening family networks to ensure a comfortable living arrangement for older adults, men, widows and those without a formal education in particular and costing social networks to reduce discrimination may enhance the overall well-being and nice protection among older adults. That is all from my side and the end-up findings can be found in our chapter. Thank you so much. Okay, thank you. So now it's our, we've got some comments and feedbacks from our two panelists. So William, please. Please turn down, please turn on your audio and also share the screen please. Okay, I just, I don't have slides regarding my comments, but I thought the defining was very interesting for both presentations actually and how you see the trends going up and down in different life states. So, you know, going, well-being going down in adolescence and sort of like picking back up for women in their 20s and then in India just seeing the different predictors of well-being among the older adults. I don't know if you know Shobit, but I'm just curious what is the typical living arrangement for older adults in India? You know, is it mainly they are married? How many of them are living alone? Is that unusual? Because, you know, that's something that we are concerned a lot about in Singapore, you know, older adults who are living alone. And it does seem to be an important factor. And so it's very interesting to see that actually gets highlighted as a major predictor of well-being in your data. And so Shobit, would you happen to know that what is the typical living arrangements in India? So the typical living arrangement in India was largely like I did, even I did my PhD at the living arrangement and we see that they major, I mean, almost seven to eight percent of the older adults are living as alone. And that was an interesting finding we had from India and the proportion is actually increasing also. Those people, older adults who are living alone, especially in urban areas. So well, regarding your own topic, do you want to share this slide? Sure, yes. Please maximize the screen. Oh, thank you. It's great to hear the presentations and happy to present. So I'm a researcher based in Singapore and that's the population that I focus on. And today I'm just going to share very briefly some work that we're doing on well-being in older adults in Singapore. We do this using the Singapore live panel, which I'll say a little bit more in a bit. But just before I get into that, provide some context for what I want to look at and talk about in my presentation, which is the stability of life satisfaction in older adults in Singapore. And how much can it change or how much can we expect it to change? Why is that important? Well, in Singapore and all across Asia, you know, these countries are aging pretty rapidly. So this graph is just showing the proportion of the population age 60 and above in several Asian countries. And if you see the dotted lines, you can see Europe and the USA for comparison. And the general story is that Asian countries are aging more rapidly than in the West. Looking specifically in Singapore, about 19% of the population is 65 and above. This is what demographers would say is an aged society. And by 2026 Singapore is projected to become a super aged society, which means over 21% of the population is going to be 65 years or older. Life expectancy has increased in Singapore and other Asian countries. So from 1990 to 2019, for example, life expectancy increased by 10 years. But if we look at health adjusted life expectancy or hail, you can see that it still lags behind. So there's about a 10 year gap between how long people are living and how many of those years are lived in good health and happiness. So that's one of the reasons why it's so important to monitor well being an older adult is because if we're interested in extending health adjusted life expectancy so that people are living their final years with a better quality of life. Yes, we want to look at physical health, but we also want to look at their mental health and their subjective well being. But all of that is based on the premise that you can change well being. And so one of the things that we are interested in looking at with our data is actually estimating how much of subjective well being is amenable to change in older adults. So we do this using the Singapore life panel which is managed by the sensor for research on successful aging. And it's a monthly survey of about 7000 respondents. They were 50 to 70 when they were originally recruited now. They're 50. I mean, many of them are in their 60s and 70s. And they answer questions each month. Most of them are using the internet. We asked them questions about their well being their social behavior, financial situation. Lots of different lifestyle and life circumstance questions. And one of the questions that we asked is a fairly standard life satisfaction question, which they rate on a five point scale. And you can see this graph is just plotting average level of life satisfaction in the sample from 2016 to 2023. There's a little bit of a dip you'll notice in 2020 because of a COVID, but on average, life satisfaction is above the midpoint of the scale to five point scale. So 3.5 to 3.46 generally means that Singaporean older adults in our sample are at least somewhat satisfied with their lives. Standard deviation is about 0.7 to 0.8. So there's quite a bit of variation in life satisfaction. And so one thing that we're interested in is, well, how much of this variation is due to stable factors versus unstable factors. So we look at that using what are called starts models or starts analysis. And what this analysis does is it decomposes the variance in life satisfaction into the proportion accounted for by stable trait, which are stable unchanging factors, something about the person that doesn't really change very much across the years. How much of that variance is due to slow changing factors. This is called the autoregressive trait. And how much of their life satisfaction report is just due to random momentary factors. So keep in mind, every month we're asking respondents to report their life satisfaction. So in any given month, potentially there's potentially some effects of their mood, or something that happened that particular month as that could influence their life satisfaction rating. So that would be the momentary states. And just to unpack what we're trying to understand with these different components. Now, it could be, for example, it could be the case that all of the variation in life satisfaction is due to a stable trait. Now that were the case you get something that looks like this so I'm plotting the trajectory of three people, and year to year, you would see no change in their life satisfaction. Meg would just be the most satisfied person from year one all the way to year 10. And then, you know, the least satisfied person would be the same across those 10 years. Another possibility is that all of the variation in life satisfaction rates are just random, momentary. So once a month, year to year you get no consistency in people's life satisfaction rating, which would mean that you find no differences between people in terms of their life satisfaction. So you might get something like this, lots of spikes up and down no particular trend across time. The third possibility is that life, life satisfaction changes slowly, gradually. So, so you see for some people it might increase slowly over time for other people might decrease slowly over time. So this will be evidence that life satisfaction is not perfectly stable. But it's not random either it's it's sort of changing the way that might suggest that people are experiencing changes in their life circumstances, or they might be experiencing changes in habits that that is causing life to change gradually over time. Okay. So, so these are just hypothetical possibilities. In reality, when you look at the data it's actually quite complex. And it's not really explained by any one of these components but it's explained some proportion of it is explained by one component and and some other proportion is accounted for by the others. So what we did is in addition to looking at these components is we asked ourselves well, you know we have all this data from 2015 to 2024. Why don't we, why don't we carve out different slices of time from the data so let's say we take one year of data and estimate these components. And let's say we take three years, and we estimate the components again, and then finally, six years. How do the estimates change, as we are observing life satisfaction over longer periods of time because that helps us sort of get a sense of how changeable life satisfaction is at different scales of time. So these are the results. And just for now I want to focus on the, the one year results so you can see the, the blue part of the bars is the proportion of variance that is accounted for by stable trade. So within a single year, life satisfaction is pretty stable about 60% of the variance and life satisfaction is due to this stable. It's difficult to change component about 35% is due to this momentary state like component which is, you know, stuff that happened that particular month that is influencing how they feel about their lives, and only 7% is due to this auto aggressive trade, which which is sort of like more meaningful systematic change. And the observation from one year to three years and then six years you can see that auto aggressive component starts to increase so so over a longer period of time we are better able to detect systematic meaningful change in well being. In general, if we're interested in observing this kind of systematic change not random change but systematic change in life satisfaction. It seems pretty difficult to do this within a one year period. And I'm basing that on the, the auto aggressive trade component, which only accounts for 7% of the variance and life satisfaction. In longer periods of time, maybe three years, maybe six years might be needed to verify more durable changes in life satisfaction. And one important implication of that is that for policies and interventions that want to improve well being in older adults, not just for a month or two months but but really create lasting change in well being. Well, we really need to look beyond a single year to be able to detect these changes. And then along with that interventions and policies need to be thinking about sustainability. Right so so so how do we create sustainable changes and well being so that these positive changes in life satisfaction can eventually stabilize. That's it for my presentation. Thank you. Thank you will answer please. Thank you very much for inviting me to talk again at the world happiness report Asian launch. It's it's evening here and so we're ahead of the rest of the world. It's what I want to talk about is the importance of free speech and not just the importance of free speech but really if countries change their degree of free speech who gains within the country who gains the most. And tying this back to the world happiness report we know for many years now, perhaps since the very first report, the explanation of factors that explain happiness across countries and one of the consistent findings in the world in this report every year is that the freedom to make life choices is a very important aspect of explaining life satisfaction whether it's the control ladder measure of life satisfaction or measuring positive effect or negative effect. Freedom to make life choices is absolutely has a very large effect on life satisfaction happiness overall. So one of the key aspects of freedom of speech is the freedom to make life choices. And we asked the question in our papers the paper written with Diana woman Tam and Nicholas Watson published recently. You'll see the reference there that we one of the key aspects of freedom to make life choices is freedom of speech. The question that we ask is do people value free speech differently depending on their resources income or education resources. And so we can think of that in economic terms is free speech a luxury good is it valued most by people at the upper end of the income or education spectrum, or is it a necessary good and valued most by people at the lower part of the income or education spectrum. In answering this question, we looked at two, two aspects. One is stated preferences when people are asked to rank the importance of free speech relative to other factors. How important, how high ranking do they give free speech and we look at whether it's ranked first or second amongst a range of choices. We look at the revealed preference of how changes in free speech across countries over time affects subjective well being measured as life satisfaction of individuals. So bringing it back to the to the literature in subjective well being we use life satisfaction measures from the world values survey over 40 years and also from the Latino barometer. We look at which is a shorter time span but has a very more frequent coverage of countries and a similar number of countries. Just to put it in context, if we look at the one of the measures of freedom of speech that we use which is the VDM measure from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The left hand graph plots the level of space free speech measure between zero, which is a complete lack of free speech to one which is complete freedom of expression the in 2023. So we'll see for countries in East Asia and Oceania, which are the countries that I've listed on the graph. Some countries have free speech scores up around point above point nine between point nine and one so especially Australia and New Zealand, Taiwan ranks very highly Japan ranks very highly as does Papua New Guinea. And then of course we have some countries which rank very low Cambodia China Laos Myanmar, Russia and Vietnam. And if we look at changes in my, my apologies, these are changes from 20, from 20, these from 2003 through 2023. So in other words, the change over the last 20 years, we see that Malaysia has had a significant increase or major increase in its freedom of expression. But almost every other country has either been unchanged or in some country, some cases such as Hong Kong and Russia in particular, very, very serious declines in the freedom of expression over that 20 year period. So, and this is what we found overall in the data set we have major changes in freedom of speech over our sample period. When people are asked to prioritize how important free speeches to them, tying it back to the world happiness report theme this year, we see a very, very strong age gradient. So relative to people who are aged 15 to 24, we find that there's less support or less, less support, less prioritization of freedom of speech as one gets older. So there's a very, very clear gradient there that it's young people who value freedom of speech the most. And as people get older, they value it less. When we look at employment status, it's the same thing students value freedom of speech very highly compared with employed or people not in the labor force. And when we look at the question which we looked at in terms of resources, in terms of stated priority given to free speech, it seems that people who are well educated or high income have the give the highest priority to freedom of speech. And as incomes reduce or as education reduces, there's less priority given to free speech. So if we ask people about the importance of free speech, it's the well to do and the educated that prioritize it most along with the young people. However, when we look at the actual effect of free speech and subjective well being here, I don't have a nice pretty graph. But what we really find very, very clearly is that changes in freedom of speech in countries has the most impact on subjective well being for two groups. One is, of course, those who prioritize free speech. So if you say free speech is important, then getting more free speech, greater freedom of speech, it lifts your life satisfaction. But importantly, increases in free speech increase the subjective well being most of the more marginalized. So the less educated and lower income people benefit most in terms of their life satisfaction from improvements in free speech, freedom of expression. So this is a really important finding when it comes to thinking about regimes that restrict freedom of speech. Restrictions of freedom of speech have the worst effect on those who have lower education or lower income. So just some concluding thoughts. I think the world happiness report from the basis of our research is it's right to emphasize the importance of freedoms. And we can trace that back theoretically both to the to sends capabilities approach, which of course emphasizes the importance of opportunities and freedoms. And also to our findings now that subjective well being is affected by freedom of speech as well. So the final concluding thought is that if governments wish to adopt an approach a policy approach to boost well being. And especially if they wish to boost the well being of the most marginalized in these societies, then one of the things they should do is to prioritize the importance of freedom of expression free speech in their country. Thank you. Thank you very much, Arthur. Now, I think it's time for some Q&A so we can collect some questions from the audience. And let's very well take over this part. Thank you. Hello everybody. My name is Barry Grimes. I'm production editor for the world's happiness report. And so we have time for a few questions. And I'll start with the question from Prem. Why Finland is the happiest country for seven years. And why can other countries not follow their happiness lifestyle. So I think all of our panelists could potentially weigh in on this question. So maybe shouldn't you want to start us off. Yeah, because our chapter is always about the ranking so people always ask, okay, what's going on in some countries and why they are so happy or they are not so happy with Finland had been on the top for a couple of years. Well, they must have done something right, because at least according to our six factor model we know that we know Finland has very good income level and house level. And in particular, they have been very high in other, you know, non economic factors such as the social support freedom in the left choices, the perception of corruption knows very low there. And they just feel they have the social support. They have a very high level of generosity. So it's like they are done right, at least in our main factors used to expand the, the happiness score happiness distribution across countries. But in addition to that I remember a couple of years ago we had one chapter focusing on the European northern European countries. And I think that some provide a lot of insights about that such as they have, you know, social trust, and equality across gender and also different social groups, and their government is super clean there and also effective and also importantly, income inequality is very low in society. So people feel safe, you have the sense of belonging there. And you don't have too much worry about their, you know, when they become sick or when they become old. So those are the key factor I think make those countries are really on the top. Well, I think we can also get some ideas from our other co-authors and the panelists. We'd like to comment on this question. I can jump in to say a little bit. We don't do a ranking for adolescents well being among different countries. But I would assume and gas Finland would be quite high in adolescents will be ranking as well because we've know that the Finland government have already incorporated well being intervention within their education curriculum. So like, I would assume that that their students have already know the concept of concept of well being and mental house from like really early years, so that they probably able to take care of their well being a little bit earlier than probably the rest of the word. Yeah, this is just a little bit that I want to say. Thank you. Now I came to hear from William and Arthur and for the kind of the Singapore and New Zealand perspective is Finland a country that you think that you're trying to emulate or to New Zealand and Singapore have their own kind of unique approaches. Maybe we start with William and then go to Arthur. I think Singapore, you know, the, the government is very good about taking a look at what goes on around the world what what effective practices and policies there are. But there's always, you know, there's always this understanding that you have to tailor things for the Singapore context, because the country is smaller than other countries and so it, you know, it has to be managed in a certain way can't. So something might work well in Singapore or in the US or Europe but, you know, we think about trying to import that into the Singapore context there's got to be some, you know, evaluation some analysis. A lot of discussion before, you know, to really understand what what what practices and ideas can we can we actually, you know, really incorporate in a beneficial way in Singapore society so I would say the Singapore government is always keeping his eyes out and open. But it's never just a blind adoption of what's going on in other countries. Thank you. And one of the challenges I think with some of these countries that score very highly is that a number of them are not very diverse societies. And so if we look at Finland and Denmark etc like that they seem to be very monocultural and very very small indigenous population, a very small number of immigrants. And it's a challenge for those of us who like the idea of diversity in multicultural societies, but we see these monocultural society seem to be scoring very highly. And we know for instance in the in the literature that there's a greater support for social supports social services, which often go to the less privileged in monocultural societies that are in diverse societies because in diverse societies, the rich think well their support will go to people not like them, whereas in countries like Finland, their support will go to people like them. So I think this does throw up a challenge to multiculturalism and diversity which coming from a very multicultural Very, very, you know 30% of our population is migrants and of course we have a large indigenous population and large Pacific population that we've many countries differ substantially from these northern European enclaves. Wonderful. Thank you very much. So I'm conscious we only have a couple of minutes left. And so I think at this point I will come back to shun but we have recorded the other questions that have been submitted. And I think we can compile some written answers for those after the call. And at this point I will come back to shun, just to wrap up the call and and do the final comments. Okay. Yeah, actually we got many more questions there. And I'm also trying to answer some of them. Well, thanks for everyone's efforts. We just introduced what's going on in this year report. Of course we cannot cover all the content there but we do invite our audience to go to our website word happiness dot report to read more details there. And in this year, as we said we focus mainly on the different age groups in particular that children and old. And we can see that there are a lot of differences in terms of happiness score and rankings among different age groups. And in other words, we cannot just that we shall not just look at their national average, we should also pay attention to different groups of the people in the society, probably they are facing very different the life circumstances for example, in some countries the old are very happy for example in the United States and China they are doing well in their country, however, in the countries like Japan, or sorry, in Korea, their old people are not very happy there. Different countries are facing different situations. So, and to, you know, better get our public policy making is better to have a larger data site, you know, this sets and on what details on each group of the population, so that we can you know design a better policies to improve their well being. But we can also see that we are facing some problem like a lack of data for for some some groups of people for example, the young people actually we are like of the data in Asia Pacific region. And I think there are a lot of, you know, work from the government or from international organizations to be down in the future to collect more information. Well, we are able to show this group of rankings because we have those Gallup data are ways it's really difficult to do this. It's difficult to know which country are doing much better than others. And in our analysis we showed out okay some factors, not just the economic factors but also some non-economic factors are very important, such as the freedom to make life choices. Actually, I got some interview from the Korean media you always ask why Korea are not doing that well even they're rich. And, I mean, if you compare their the six factor we'll see that okay, they're not doing very well for example in their perceived corruption they're not that clean you know not as clean as Northern European countries or Singapore. And also more importantly they have very low freedom to make life choices there. So it's like, and people are probably their success were very narrow defined it's very hard for them to achieve a different styles of success in our society. And so that means there are a lot of things are important in our life which matter for happiness. We are really want to have, we really want to see more and more studies in the future. And so that's why in different years of work have reported we cover a different topics we are trying to broaden our the horizon about the happy studies. And, due to the time limit, we are not able to answer so many questions for you guys, but I do hope, and you can send us emails if you're interested in some part of our presentation or some part of the study. We read the report and in talk to us individually. Thank you very much and thanks a lot for our panelists and co-author to join this event. I hope to see some of the guys or all of the guys in next year's Asian launch events. Thank you very much. And I think at your time limit, we will just stop over here for today and have a have a good day and a good night. Thank you, everyone. Bye bye.