Global Happiness Index: Why does Pakistan rank so high?
“The happiest countries are those “where people feel a sense of belonging, where they trust and enjoy each other and their shared institutions. There is also more resilience, because shared trust reduces the burden of hardships, and thereby lessens the inequality of well-being.”
Introduction
After the publication of the latest edition of the Gross Happiness Index which ranks Pakistan at 66, there has been a lot of discussion about the reasons for this state of affairs in a country that otherwise has a dismal record in almost any other field. Not only Pakistan ranked the highest in South Asia, above Nepal (100), Bangladesh (125), Sri Lanka (130), and India (140), surprisingly, it also ranked higher than China (93). But n fact, some European countries such as Croatia (75) and Greece (82), as well as the richer Muslim countries such as Turkey (79) and Malaysia (80) ranked lower than Pakistan.
The answer to the question raised above lies in the way the World Happiness Report by the SDSN of the United Nations is prepared.
Gross National Happiness is a term coined in 1972 by Sicco Mansholt, one of the Founding Fathers of the European Union. However, he was not the author of this idea; happiness theory as a measure of well-being of citizens of a country instead of traditional GDP became popular it was propounded by Richard Layard of the London School of Economics in his seminal book Happiness: Lessons From A New Science. Based on several surveys conducted in the UK and the USA, he maintained that despite massive economic growth in these countries, their citizens had not become happier in the post-war period.
His interpretation? Nominal GDP is not an adequate criterion to use for measuring the well-being of a country or even making cross-country or time-series comparisons. No doubt, he maintained, incomes were important, and people gave high value to things like family, friendship, social status, and living in a safe society. Not surprisingly, he was echoing Simon Kuznets, the inventor of the concept of GDP in the 1930s, who had warned that it was not a suitable measure of a country’s economic development. He rightly understood that GDP was not a welfare measure, not a measure of how well we are all doing.
In 2011, UNO passed a Resolution urging member nations to measure the happiness and well-being of the country. Since then, the SDSN of the United Nations prepares and publishes an annual World Happiness Report by looking at the state of global happiness in 156 countries as per the following six factors namely levels of GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom, and corruption. Of these, two are measured quantitatively — GDP per capita adjusted for real purchasing power and life expectancy at birth. The other four factors are measured by answers to the following questions
If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on? Are you satisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life? Have you donated money to a charity in the past month? Is corruption widespread throughout the government? Is corruption widespread within businesses?
However, the final ranking of a country in the happiness index is heavily influenced by the weight given to the above-mentioned six factors. For example, the largest single contributor to happiness comes from the existence of good social support systems which account for 34 percent, followed by GDP per capita (26 percent), life expectancy (21 percent), freedom (11 percent), generosity (five percent), and lack of corruption (three percent).
Main reasons for Pakistan being the happiest country in South Asia?
There are as many reasons as the perspective to look at this issue. For example, Panos Mourdoukoutas, Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at LIU Post in New York, while comparing the respective performance of India and Pakistan in the aforesaid happiness ranking in 2017 concluded that
“Pakistan has fared better than India in the areas of business development and government spending, which matter a great deal when it comes to the freedom of people to make economic choices.”
Simply put, Pakistan has been getting ahead of India in working towards the right cocktail between market and government institutions — deploying each institution in areas of the economy where it excels. And this strategy has begun to make a difference in the way Pakistanis create and spend wealth in the pursuit of happiness.”
On the other hand, Daud Khan, a staff member of FAO, maintains that “it is the music, the optimistic and cheerful nature of Pakistani people, the feeling that things are getting better, and the close relationship Pakistanis have with family, friends, and community. These are things which make Pakistanis unique and something we need to recognise and cherish.”
This is a fairly fairly accurate explanation for the above-average happiness ranking of Pakistan. Big-name travel influencers, such as the Food Ranger (4.66 million YouTube subscribers) and Drew Binsky have confirmed it. One of Binsky’s videos, which celebrated the country’s hospitality culture, showed him trying to pay for things at market stalls and in restaurants and being rebuffed. In one of his videos titled “Why is everything free in Pakistan?”, he says
“The people of Pakistan are incredibly joyful. They’re laid-back, they don’t stress much, they don’t care about living in a nice house or driving a fancy car, they are just living a happy life and that’s all there is to it!”
However, to me, besides the above-mentioned reasons, it is the synergistic effect of the following four factors which injects a heavy dose of happiness into the lives of Pakistanis namely
1. Higher Standard of Living: When converted into dollars, the average income of a worker in Pakistan looks meagre as compared to those in other countries due to weak Rupee-Dollar parity. However, when measured in terms of its purchasing power, Pakistan is far ahead of these countries. Just look at this graph.
a. better development model pursued by Pakistan (seeing is believing-visit Pakistan and see the state of infrastructure even in the villages
b. Less inequality-our Gini coefficient which measures the level of inequality is the lowest in South Asia
c. Better social security networks- our Benazir Income Support Scheme has been rated as one of the best in the world
d. Greater philanthropy of the public- just google which are the top five countries in the world in terms of philanthropy
Comparing Pakistan’s happiness scores between 2005–8 and 2016–18, there has been a significant improvement in its happiness score by 0.703 on a scale from 0–10, placing it number 20 on the list of counties that have grown happier. Reason? Our formal economy may not be growing spectacularly but its informal economy which is 70 % of its formal one, is doing quite well. Couple with improved law and order situation as a result of reduced terrorism, comparatively better infrastructure, less load shedding, the advent of democracy, and the cellular phone network!
