World Happiness Report- Highlights

The United Nation Sustainable Development Solutions Network has released its annual report called “World Happiness Report, 2021”. The report was collected and prepared slightly differently amid the COVID-19 Pandemic. The report measures the subjective well-being by relying on three indicators namely, Life Evaluation, Positive Emotions and Negative Emotions. The report was presented ahead of “World Happiness day” which is observed on March 20.

Highlights

In order to measure the life evaluations, Gallup World Poll asked people to evaluate their current life using image of a ladder. The best possible life for them was evaluated as 10 while the worst possible life as 0. The report highlights that, “life evaluations” provide the most informative measure to conduct the international comparisons because this indicator captures the quality of life in a complete and stable way.

Positive Emotions

The positive emotions were captured in the report by asking the people whether they smiled or laughed the previous day. The positive response was coded as 1 while the negative response was coded as 0. Following this, average response was calculated for each person in the range of 0 and 1.

Negative Emotions

Lastly, the negative emotions were measured by asking the respondents whether they experienced any specific negative emotions on the same day.

Key Findings

Finland was again titled as the World’s happiest country because the overall rankings remained similar to the index of 2020. The other countries that performed well on the rankings are Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and Netherlands. United States was ranked at 19^th position. Afghanistan was titled as the ‘Least Happy’ country. India was ranked at 139^th position out of 149 countries. India was ranked at 144^th position out of 156 countries in the “world happiness report, 2020”.  Ten countries who have been ranked behind India in the year 2021 are Burundi, Yemen, Tanzania, Haiti, Malawi, Lesotho, Botswana, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan.

Month: Current Affairs - March, 2021