PH falls to 61st spot in 2021 World Happiness Report

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 24) – Filipinos are less happy in 2020. That's as the Philippines drops nine spots from its previous ranking in 2019, to be the 61st happiest country in the world based on the 2021 World Happiness Report.

The Philippines occupied the 52nd spot in the last World Happiness Report, published annually by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network from the data of Gallup World Poll and Lloyd's Register Foundation.

The country garnered a total score of 5.88 in the 2021 World Happiness Report, which used the average scores from 2018 to 2020 in rating 149 countries.

The report emphasized that "global life evaluations have shown remarkable resilience" last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

"This shows that COVID-19 has led to only modest changes in the overall rankings, reflecting both the global nature of the pandemic and a widely shared resilience in the face of it," the report said.

The latest World Happiness Report also made a separate assessment on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in people's happiness.

The Philippines finished 74th out of 95 countries in this category, with a score of 5.08. Its 2020 ranking significantly dropped from the previous year, which used the 2017-2019 average scores to measure people's happiness before the pandemic, where it landed the 42nd spot out of the same 95 countries.

The report highlighted that the COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on people's negative emotions, where it identified about 42 countries that experienced higher frequency of negative feelings such as sadness and worry. Positive emotions like laughter and enjoyment remained unchanged from the global sample of countries between 2017-2019 and 2020.

For the fourth year running, Finland has come out on top in the annual list. Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland, and the Netherlands followed in second, third, fourth and fifth position respectively.

The World Happiness Report employs three indicators to measure a person's subjective well-being. The indicators include life measures, positive emotions, and negative emotions. The report also uses other measures like gross domestic product, social support, life expectancy, personal freedom, and perceptions of corruption in assessing a country's happiness rating.