The World Happiness report for the year 2023 has been published on Wednesday, and what unfortunately comes as no surprise is Lebanon’s ranking at the bottom as the least happy in a list of 137 countries around the world.
Lebanon ranked 136th, just ahead of Afghanistan, while Finland ranked first as the happiest country with Denmark, Iceland and Sweden trailing behind. Surprisingly, Israel is in 4th position, up five positions from last year, despite the war in Gaza that started on October 7, 2023.
In last week’s 2023 report of the Misery Index (HAMI) by Steve Hanke, Lebanon ranked third as the most miserable country, behind Argentina and Venezuela and ahead of Syria, which ranks fourth, with a score of 266.1.
In a tweet, Steve Hanke emphasized that the primary cause of Lebanon’s ranking in the Misery Index this year is its miserable economy and sky-high inflation.
The happiness ranking is based on individuals’ self-assessed evaluations of life satisfaction, as well as GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and corruption.
War-torn Afghanistan and Lebanon remain the two unhappiest countries in the survey, with average life evaluations more than five points lower (on a scale running from 0 to 10) than in the ten happiest countries.
This year’s report also found that younger generations were happier than their older peers in most of the world’s regions — but not all.
Furthermore, to study the inequality of happiness, the report focused on the happiness gap between the top and the bottom halves of the population. This gap is small in countries where most people are happy, but also in countries where almost no one is happy.
Happiness inequality increased in every region except Europe, which authors described as a “worrying trend”, the study added.
