You may not have known it but yesterday, March 20th was the “International Day of Happiness”, a United Nations project where thousands of people all around the world took part in various activities to support the event which had the motto, "I will try to create more happiness in the world around me".
Ahead of celebrations of the world happiness day, the UN released its latest World Happiness Report which ranked the happiest countries in the world. According to the report, measuring happiness is much better than measuring GDP, health, education, and other aspects of human life. The overall subjective feeling of happiness can impact the life of a person in so many ways, the report noted.
“The widespread interest in the World Happiness Reports, of which this is the fourth, reflects growing global interest in using happiness and subjective well-being as primary indicators of the quality of human development,” the World Happiness Report Update 2016 read.
The report noted that happiness was not directly linked to wealth. It found that progressive and highly developed countries such as Singapore (ranked 22), United Kingdom (23), and France (32), among others, are not as happy as other less developed countries that had a higher overall happiness index. Even oil-rich Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates (28), Saudi Arabia (34), Qatar (36), and Kuwait (41), had a lower happiness index than relatively poorer countries.
Australia (9), New Zealand (8) and Canada (6) were the only non-European countries in the top-ten list on the index which had Denmark (1), Switzerland (2) and Iceland (3) topping the list as the happiest places on earth.
China, the world's most populous country, was ranked 83rd and India, the world's largest democracy, came in at 118.
Afghanistan (154), Togo (155), and Syria (156) rounded up the least happy countries in the world, according to the report.