The United Nations (UN) recently released its 9^th edition of the “World Happiness Report” (WHR) presenting a landmark survey of the state of happiness across 149 countries. The main purpose of the report is to examine the science of measuring and understanding subjective well-being while presenting updated rankings and analysis of life evaluations throughout the world. In detail, the report calculates its rankings using data compiled by the ‘Gallup World Poll’, which is based on the responses of individuals (assigning ratings that range between 0 (worst) and 10 (best)) to central life evaluation questions structured in surveys conducted over the three-year (2018-2020) period. Moreover, national average life evaluations rankings in the 2021 WHR are accompanied by the citation of six major variables namely, GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption, that contribute to explaining and understanding the attained national average scores. Therefore, the report attempts to find an evident link or relation between the results it reached and said variables.

With respect to the results of the report, and on a global level, Finland topped the list of countries in terms of happiness over the 2018-2020 period with a score of 7.842 followed by Denmark and Switzerland with respective scores of 7.620 and 7.571.

 Regionally, Gulf States were the top-performing countries in terms of overall happiness over the 2018-2020 period. In specific, Bahrain led the list (global rank: 22; score: 6.647) followed by the UAE (global rank: 25; score: 6.561) and Saudi Arabia (global rank: 26; score: 6.494). As far as Lebanon is concerned, the country scored 4.584 (down from 4.772 in the previous report) in the overall happiness metric over the covered three-year period positioning 10^th regionally and 123^rd globally.