Which nations have the highest standard of living? It’s a tough question to answer, often because the goal posts are arbitrary. Costa Rica is certainly not the richest country on the planet, for instance, but it frequently ranks as one whose citizens are happiest. So, an annual Gallup poll seeks to investigate which nations around the world have “thriving” populations by asking the people themselves — they ask residents how they’d rate their quality of life now, and how they predict it will be in 5 years. And the results are routinely rather depressing.

For instance, it can be extrapolated from the results that roughly just 21% of the global population considers itself to be thriving — around 1/5th of the the 7 billion-strong worldwide community. And only 19 nations in the world (of the countries where data was available) saw more than 50% of the residents classify their lives as being good enough to be considered ‘thriving’. Here’s the list of those nations — which are led by European nations and countries, Canada, Australia and the US:

Venezuela, Panama, Brazil and Costa Rica all polled pretty well too — according to the survey, Venezuelans and Panamanians are happier than Americans.

Gallup has more on how the poll works:

Gallup classifies respondents’ wellbeing as “thriving,” “struggling,” or “suffering,” according to how they rate their current and future lives on a ladder scale with steps numbered from 0 to 10 based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. People are considered thriving if they rate their current lives a 7 or higher and their lives in five years an 8 or higher … Majorities of residents in 19 countries — mostly in Europe and the Americas — rated their lives well enough to be classified this way. Denmark [72%], along with Sweden (69%) and Canada (69%), led the list

And Chad ranks dead last — just 1% could be said to have a high level of wellbeing. Here’s the list of nations where less than a quarter are thriving:

Clearly, there’s much work to be done.

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Images: Gallup. See Gallup for an interactive map of the world’s wellbeing.