Bahrain 42nd in World Happiness Report

Manama: Bahrain was ranked 42nd in the World Happiness Report published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

World Happiness Report, a landmark survey of the state of global happiness, ranked Bahrain at 42 ahead of numerous countries in the region, including Morroco (52), Egypt (56), Jordan (112) and Iraq (147). However, the other GCC nations fared better when compared to Bahrain. UAE was ranked the highest at 28th, followed by Saudi Arabia at 34, Qatar at 36, Kuwait at 41. A total of 157 nations were ranked in the report.

The report, released in advance of UN World Happiness Day on March 20, reviews the state of happiness in the world and shows how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness. The report considered factors such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) social support, perception of corruption, and healthy years of life expectancy.

“The first World Happiness Report was published in April 2012, in support of the High Level Meeting at the United Nations on happiness and well being, chaired by the Prime Minister of Bhutan,” the report stated. “Since then we have come a long way. Increasingly, happiness is considered to be the proper measure of social progress and the goal of public policy. This is the fourth World Happiness Report, and it is different in several respects from its predecessors. These differences relate to timing, content and geography. In this report we give new attention to the inequality of happiness across individuals. The distribution of world happiness is presented first by global and regional charts showing the distribution of answers, from roughly 3,000 respondents in each of more than 150 countries, to a question asking them to evaluate their current lives on a ladder where 0 represents the worst possible life and 10, the best possible.”

“For the world as a whole, the distribution is very normally distributed about the median answer of 5, with the population-weighted mean being 5.4. When the global population is split into 10 geographic regions, the resulting distributions vary greatly in both shape and average values. Only two regions—the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean—have more unequally distributed happiness than does the world as a whole,” the report said. “People are happier living in societies where there is less inequality of happiness,” it added.

They also find that happiness inequality has increased significantly (comparing 2012-2015 to 2005-2011) in most countries, in almost all global regions, and for the population of the world as a whole.