The United Nation on Thursday released the World Happiness Report 2025 that focused on the impact of caring and sharing on people’s happiness. This year, Finland has been declared as the happiest country out of 147 countries. Which one is the unhappiest?
The World Happiness Report 2025 has declared Afghanistan as the unhappiest country with a score of 1.364. The report is published based analysis of how the residents of 147 countries rate their quality of life.
In the Happiness Report 2025, there were drastic decline in people’s responses to Ranking by Life Evaluations with key variables like GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, perceptions of corruption, dystopia and others in Afghanistan.
According to the report, people in Afghanistan have reported no freedom to make life choices.
“There remains a large gap between the top and bottom countries – more than six points (on a 0–10 scale) between Finland at the top and Afghanistan at the bottom. The top countries are more tightly grouped than the bottom ones. The top twenty have a spread of less than one point on the 0–10 scale, with the corresponding spread among the bottom twenty being three times as great. The remaining 100-odd countries cover the remaining 2.3 points of the total range,” the report stated.
This means that relatively modest changes in a national average can lead to a large shift in rank, as illustrated by 95 percent confidence regions of more than 25 ranks for several countries in the middle of the global list, it added.
In the report, the researchers also stated that ranks are not so easily compared since there were 156 countries ranked in 2013 compared to 147 this year.
“Afghanistan has gone in the reverse direction with a drop of almost 2.7 points between 2013 and 2025. The average life evaluation is now 1.36, by far the lowest average score ever seen in all our reports. Furthermore, life is especially difficult for Afghan women, as their average is only 1.16 points,” the report stated.
With respect to life evaluation, fewer countries whose life evaluations have fallen by more than one point on the 0–10 scale. Going from the largest to the smallest drops in life evaluations, these seven countries are Afghanistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Malawi, Venezuela, Egypt and Botswana. These are mainly countries in or near zones of major conflict.
The lowest frequency of positive emotions is in Afghanistan, the report revealed. It also has the most frequent negative emotions. The researchers also stated national decisions are likely to have more impacts on the wellbeing of individuals in other countries to the extent that the resulting actions create or destroy peace.
“Overall rankings of individual life evaluations are especially low in countries wracked by violence, notably Afghanistan and Lebanon, and other countries not even in the rankings, such as Sudan and Syria, because conditions have been too unsafe to permit surveys,” it stated.