Note4Students

From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :

Prelims level: World Happiness Report

Mains level: Not Much

India ranks 136th in the World Happiness Report 2022, while Finland becomes the happiest country for the fifth consecutive year.

One can definitely question the credibility of such reports whenever India is being grouped with some African countries that too below Pakistan.

The WHR is an annual publication of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
It measures three main well-being indicators: life evaluations, positive emotions, and negative emotions (described in the report as positive and negative affect).
Since 2011, the World Happiness Report (WHR) is released every year around the time of International Day of Happiness on March 20.
It was adopted by the UN General Assembly based on a resolution tabled by Bhutan.

The ranking is done on a three-year average based on surveys of ‘Life Evaluation’ conducted by Gallup World Poll which surveys around 1000 people from each country to evaluate their current life on a scale of 0-10.
On this scale, 10 marks the best possible and 0 as the worst possible life.
Further, six key variables GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and corruption contribute to explaining life evaluations.

The top five countries in the list are from Europe.
While the United States held the 16th spot in the happiest countries list.
Following Finland, Denmark bagged the second rank, while Iceland and Switzerland stood at third and fourth rank.
The Netherlands was at the fifth rank in the list.
Meanwhile, Luxembourg, Norway, Israel, and New Zealand were the remaining countries in the top 10.

Afghanistan held the last position of 146th in the list, with Lebanon (145th), Zimbabwe (144th), Rwanda (143rd), and Botswana (142nd) following.
Bangladesh has improved its ranking by seven notches on the WHI from 101 last year to 94 in 2022 out of 146 countries included in the report.

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