NEW DELHI: The World Happiness Report 2021 was published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UNSDSN) on Friday, March 19, 2021. Although India displayed a slight improvement in the ranking, it is a part of the 10 lowest ranking countries in the Happiness Index, ranking at 139 out of 149 countries assessed. Of the top ten countries in the index, nine were from the continent of Europe. Finland, securing the first rank, was followed by Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Austria.
The World Happiness Reports evaluates levels of happiness among citizens from different countries by taking into account factors such as Gross Domestic Product, social support, personal freedom, and levels of corruption in each nation. This year, however, authors from UNSDSN addressed a new issue during the analysis for the report — the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating impact on nations around the world. As a new addition, this year’s report provided two different sets of rankings — one list was based on the average of three years of surveys taken between 2018 and 2020 by Gallup, while another focused solely on the year 2020 to understand how COVID impacted subjective well-being.
Jeffrey Sachs, one of the authors of the report, said that the World Happiness Report 2021 reminds everyone that the world must focus on wellbeing rather than mere wealth, which will be fleeting indeed if the governments don’t do a much better job of addressing the challenges of sustainable development. According to the authors of the Index, trust was the key factor used to measure happiness in each country; nations where citizens had more faith vested in its institutions and had greater income equality were considered to be more successful in combating the pandemic.