An international report has ranked countries around the world by happiness – and the Arab world has some ... unusual results.
A recent report by Happy Planet Index listed the HPI rankings worldwide based on three main measures: experienced well-being, life expectancy, and ecological footprint; those scores are then adjusted for inequality.
Surprisingly, countries such as Algeria, Palestine and Iraq performed better than the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Some have attributed this to the levels of poverty that wealthy GCC countries like the UAE keep hidden. Bahrain's recent turmoil could have affected its score, too.
Though Egypt is at the lower end of the spectrum, it still did better than Gulf nations like Kuwait - our juvenile explanation is the amount of smiles you are welcomed with anywhere in Cairo, albeit people's hardships!
Out of the 151 countries on the ranking, here is how the participant Arab countries performed: