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The World Happiness Report 2015 has been recently published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network in Rome in advance to mark UN World Happiness Day which is celebrated on March 20. This year, for the first time, the World Happiness Report gives a special role to the measurement and consequences of inequality in the distribution of wellbeing among countries and regions. In previous reports the editors have argued that happiness provides a better indicator of human welfare than income, poverty, education, health and good government measured separately. In a parallel way, they now argue that the inequality of well-being provides a broader measure of inequality. They find that people are happier living in societies where there is less inequality of happiness. 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.

This year’s World Happiness Report is written by a group of individual experts (John Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs) who evaluated 156 countries’ well-being and lifestyle by measuring universally valuable constructs like income, social support, having the freedom to make life choices and healthy life expectancy. Situation of World Happiness was presented 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 represents the best possible life.

This report suggests that subjective wellbeing and happiness are primary indicators of the quality of human development. The report suggests that just as subjective well-being provides a broader and more inclusive measure of the quality of life than income, the inequality of subjective well-being provides a more inclusive and meaningful measure of the distribution of well-being among individuals within a society. Now many governments and organizations are using wellbeing research to develop policies for improving lives.

Subjective well-being encompasses three different aspects: cognitive evaluations of one’s life, positive emotions (joy, pride), and negative ones (pain, anger, worry). While these aspects of subjective well-being have different determinants, in all cases these determinants go well beyond people’s income and material conditions. All these aspects of subjective well-being were measured separately to derive a more comprehensive measure of people’s quality of life and to allow a better understanding of its determinants (including people’s objective conditions). National statistical agencies should incorporate questions on subjective well-being in their standard surveys to capture people’s life evaluations, good experiences and life priorities.

There are two elements to measures happiness and wellbeing module. The first is a primary measure of life evaluation. This represents the absolute minimum required to measure subjective well-being, and it is recommended that all national statistical agencies include this measure in one of their annual household surveys. The second element consists of a short series of affect questions and an experimental question (a question about life meaning or purpose). The inclusion of these measures complements the primary evaluative measure both because they capture different aspects of subjective well-being (with a different set of drivers) and because the difference in the nature of the measures means that they are affected in different ways by cultural and other sources of measurement error. While it is highly desirable that these questions are collected along with the primary measure as part of the core, these questions should be considered a lower priority than the primary measure. Furthermore, positive emotions play a strong role in support of life evaluations, and second that most of the impact of freedom and generosity on life evaluations is mediated by their influence on positive emotions. That is, freedom and generosity have a large impact on positive effect, which in turn has an impact on life evaluations.

The report suggests that the difference in wellbeing between the top 10 and bottom 10 countries and regions can be explained by:

• Social support so that you have friends and family to count on in times of trouble
• Freedom to choose what you do in life
• Generosity and how much people donate to charity
• Absence of corruption in business and government
• GDP
• Healthy life expectancy.

National resilience is another major determinant of Happiness. Resilience enables a positive response to a crisis and increases positive emotion and comes from having a caring and effective community through: Strength of social fabric; Levels of trust; Institutional quality; Generosity; and Shared purpose

The rankings, which are based on surveys in 156 countries conducted over three years (2013-2015), reveal an average score of 5.1, out of 10. Several key variables explain three-quarters of the variation in annual national average scores over time and among countries: real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, freedom from corruption, and generosity, the report added.

According to the report the 10 top countries are once again all small or medium-sized western industrial countries, of which seven are in Western Europe. In the top 10 countries, life evaluations average 7.4 on the 0 to 10 scale, while for the bottom 10 the average is less than half that, at 3.4. Denmark was the country with the highest happiness index. Followed by Switzerland in the second place. Iceland was ranked third followed by Norway, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden respectively as the world’s top ten happiest countries. Whereas, Burundi was the lowest ranked country followed by Syria and Togo in the bottom three.

Nepal ranks 107th among 156 countries with a score of 4.793, according to the report. Bangladesh is in the 110th position with a score of 4.643, Sri Lanka (4.415) is 117th, and India with a score of 4.404 is in 118th position. Similarly, Afghanistan is at the 154th position with a score of 3.360.However, Bhutan and Pakistan are happier than Nepal, according to the report that has ranked Bhutan at 84th position with a score of 5.196 and Pakistan at 92nd position with a score of 5.132. GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and freedom from corruption in Nepal was found to be higher than India and Sri Lanka.

Major highlights from 2016 World Happiness Report

• The US has inequality of wellbeing to match its much-discussed income gap. Americans are 85th among 157 countries ranked by the gap between the most and least happy
• Greece - beset by economic and political problems - had the largest decrease in public happiness as well as large inequalities in happiness
• Parenting is hardest on those in high-GDP countries, and particularly among the unemployed
• Happiness inequality has increased significantly in most countries, in almost all global regions, and for the population of the world as a whole
• The top 10 countries in 2016 are the same as in the 2015 report, although their ordering has changed once again, with Denmark regaining the top spot from Switzerland
• Of the world's other populous nations, Indonesia came in at 79, Brazil at 17, Pakistan at 92, Nigeria at 103, Bangladesh at 110, Russia at 56, Japan at 53 and Mexico at 21