Feeling Happy?

A few years back, there were no freely available, public databases. Yes, there was Axco, for a fee, and all the big insurers and brokers had something internally and occasionally available for clients. But then Airmic shook things up by announcing it was going to launch a database. Airmic ended up partnering with Axco on the Insight Risk Manager tool.

This was followed by RIMS announcing that its professional members could access the Zurich Multinational Insurance Application for free. Then Ferma got interested in potentially getting involved in the Airmic/Axco tool, and now it has been announced that the Insight Risk Manager tool will be made available to RIMS professional members.

The complaint from risk managers before was that they got different answers according to which insurer or broker they asked about a particular compliance issue in a certain territory. Let’s hope all of the databases prove useful rather than adding to the compliance confusion and that risk managers won’t be confronted with different answers from the different databases.

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Speaking of databases, a new report has been produced that ranks countries around the world – according to Happiness.

Yes, the World Happiness Report 2015 ranks the world’s territories according to how happy their people are. Top of the list is Switzerland, followed by Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia. Bottom of the list Togo, followed by Burundi, Syria, Benin, Rwanda and Afghanistan.

But of more interest is the ranking based on changes in Happiness from 2005-2007 to 2012-2014 (or pre-recession to last year). Top of the list is Nicaragua, followed by Zimbabwe, Ecuador, Moldova, Sierra Leone, Paraguay, Liberia, Peru, Chile, and Uzbekistan. Bottom of the list is Greece, followed by Egypt, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, Jordan and Spain.

What we need now is a ranking of countries by ‘happiness with their global programmes.” It would probably look much the same.