Bhutan is happiest in Asia (Exclusive)

Kathmandu, August 05: Despite political suppression and access to outside world, Bhutan tops the Asian counties in terms of happiness, the ‘World Map of Happiness’ states.

According to the map, Bhutan stands in the eighth position in the world’s happiest countries and top among the SAARC region. Nepal stands at 119th happiest country while India stands at 125, Pakistan at 166, Bagladesh at 104, Sri Lanka at 93 and Maldives stands at 66 position. The new entrant in the regional body, Afghanistan, has not been included in the study list. The northern neighbor China stands at 82 position.

Happiness index for Bhutan is 253.33. Similarly, life expectancy is 62.9 years while per capital GDP is 1.4.
 
The map, the first of its kind, is prepared by Adrian White, a British analytic social psychologist from University of Leicester. The map rates 178 countries around the world.

The parameters for the ranking are various but the study has stressed three major sources of happiness — health, wealth and access to education.

Denmark stands at the top of the happy list while an African country, Burundi lies at the bottom of the list.

“I have performed new analysis with [this] data to come to a unique and novel set of results; specifically the extent of correlation between measures of poverty, health and education, and the variable of happiness,” the analyst states.

The ranking is based on data published by the New Economic Foundation, from individual countries and findings of over 100 studies carried out by the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organisation (UNESCO) on access to schooling, by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on life expectancy, by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on GDP per capita, Veenhoven Database, Latinbarometer, Afrobarometer and UNHDR between 2002 and 2005. Bhutan News Service