World Happiness Report 2021: India ranks 139 out of 149 countries; Finland tops

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SunstarTV Bureau: The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network has released the annual report of ‘World Happiness Report 2021’ where India ranked 139, out of 149 countries evaluated.

Reportedly, the report has been collected slightly differently due to the Covid pandemic.

According to submissive report, the Gallup World Poll, which remains the principal source of collecting report to measure life evolutions of people. Meanwhile, the report provided the most informative measure for international comparisons which have capture the quality of life “in a more complete and stable way than emotional reports based on daily experiences.”

To count over the positive emotions, the report by asking respondents whether they smiled or laughed a lot the previous day. An affirmative response has coded as a 1 while a negative response is coded as 0 and the average response is calculated for each person, with values ranging from 0 and 1.

Besides, negative emotions are measured by asking them whether they experienced specific negative emotions a lot on the same day.

“Negative effect, for each person, is given by the average of their yes or no answers about three emotions: worry, sadness, and anger. National averages are created in the same way as for positive effect,” the report reads.

Finland was able to defend its title of the world’s happiest country as the overall rankings, according to the report, “remained very similar to last year.” The other countries that scored high on the rankings include Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, and the Netherlands. The United States has been ranked 19, five spots behind Canada, while people in Afghanistan remained the least happy.

Notably, in the World Happiness Report 2020, India was ranked 144 out of 156 countries surveyed. But this year’s rankings exclude countries where the survey was not carried out or where the sample sizes were smaller, compared to the three-year averages usually used. The ten countries behind India on World Happiness Report 2021 rankings are Burundi, Yemen, Tanzania, Haiti, Malawi, Lesotho, Botswana, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan.

Here’s the list of the top 20 ranked countries on the World Happiness Report 2021: