World Happiness Report 2021

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United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network published the World Happiness Index 2021 report on 19th March.

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According to the World Happiness Index report of 2021, Finland has been declared the world’s happiest country for the fourth consecutive year.

India’s position has been slight better in comparison to last year rank of 140. This year it has achieved the rank of 139 out of 149 countries. Out of top 10 countries nine are from Europe. The top 10 nations are: Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Austria.

The factors that are included in the report are GDP, social support, personal freedom, and levels of corruption in each nation. But this year the ongoing COVID-19 and its impact has also been a challenge in preparing the report.

Well being is more important than only wealth because it will continue to deplete if challenges of sustainable development are not taken care of. This years’ World Happiness Index had two-fold aim, first to focus on the effects of COVID-19 on the structure and quality of people’s lives, and second to describe and evaluate how governments all over the world have dealt with the pandemic.

This years’ report provided two different sets of rankings — one was the standard list based on the average of three years of surveys taken in 2018-2020 by Gallup, while another focussed only on 2020 to know how COVID affected subjective well being.

Trust was the key factor used to calculate happiness in each country. Nations where residents had more faith vested in its institutions and had greater income equality were considered to be more successful in tackling the pandemic. Of all the six supporting factors (income, health, someone to count on, freedom, generosity, and trust) for well being trust is the most important of all. It was shown to be as important as ever in supporting happiness during the pandemic, and was found to be even more important when COVID-19 required the whole structure of private and public lives to be refocused on fighting the pandemic.

US slipped down to one position to be at rank 19. Afghanistan was the last country listed in the index.

Many Asian countries have improved their ranks except China that slipped down from 84th rank to 94th rank.