Quotes by Rachel Boothroyd

The results of the Gallup Organisation’s most recent poll on wellbeing placed Venezuela in sixth place out of 124 countries. The poll, which was published on Thursday, is the result of a series of telephone and face-to-face surveys conducted between February and December 2010.

Using the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, whereby respondents are asked to rate their current and future lives based on a scale of 1-10—with 10 being the best life possible—the poll found that 64% of Venezuelans considered themselves to be ‘thriving’, i.e., those who rated their current lives at 7 or above and those who rated their future lives at 8 or above...

Beaten only by Denmark (79%), Canada (69%), Sweden (69%) and Australia (66%) and scoring the same levels of “thriving” as Finland (64%), Venezuela occupied the highest position of those countries considered to be in the “developing world” and came first out of all the Latin American nations. In keeping with Gallup’s results from 2009, the Americas had the highest rate of “thriving”, with a median of 39%. The study highlighted that out of the populations in 124 countries, only 19 (all in Europe and America) classified themselves as being prosperous, with the list of countries where ‘the majority saw themselves as thriving’ including predominantly richer and more developed countries. Despite this, some countries with larger economies, such as the United States (59%) and the UK (54%), conversely ranked lower in the poll and came in at 12th and 17th respectively.