Bangladesh has ranked 118th out of 137 countries in World Happiness Report 2023, drastically dropping by 24 notches from last year's position.
The country was in 94th place out of 146 nations in 2022. In 2021, Bangladesh was ranked 101st.
Bangladesh again dropped out of top 100 nations in this year's ranking, according to UN-sponsored World Happiness Report-2023 published on Monday.
Finland has been named the world's happiest country for the sixth straight year followed by Denmark, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and Luxembourg.
India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka have placed 126th, 108th, 117th and 112th respectively while Nepal placed 78th in the happiness index.
Meanwhile, the war-torn Afghanistan and Lebanon remain at the bottom in the list.
In this year's rankings, Russia has ranked 70 and Ukraine 92.
While the same countries tend to appear in the top 20 year after year, there's a new entrant this year. The country is Lithuania.
It has been over ten years since the first World Happiness Report was published.
And it is exactly ten years since the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 66/281, proclaiming 20 March to be observed annually as International Day of Happiness. Since then, more and more people have come to believe that our success as countries should be judged by the happiness of our people, said the report.
There is also a growing consensus about how happiness should be measured. This consensus means that national happiness can now become an operational objective for governments, the report added.
In the latest report on world happiness, there is a thing for optimism. For one, benevolence is about 25% higher than it was pre-pandemic.
“Benevolence to others, especially the helping of strangers, which went up dramatically in 2021, stayed high in 2022,” John Helliwell, one of the authors of the World Happiness Report, said in an interview with CNN.
And global happiness has not taken a hit in the three years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Life evaluations from 2020 to 2022 have been “remarkably resilient,” the report says, with global averages basically in line with the three years preceding the pandemic, reports CNN.
“Even during these difficult years, positive emotions have remained twice as prevalent as negative ones, and feelings of positive social support twice as strong as those of loneliness,” Helliwell said in a news release.
