Philippines’ Happiness Rank Down from 52nd to 61st spot – World Happiness Report 2021

Filipinos are less happy in 2020, according to the 2021 World Happiness Report, as the country lands the 61st spot in the worldwide rankings for the annual survey aimed to measure people’s happiness and quality of life around the globe.

This year’s World Happiness Report (WHR) focuses on the effects of 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic started, on the happiness of people around the world by using the average scores of each country from 2018 to 2020.

The Philippines, with a score of 5.880, ranked 61st out of 149 countries who participated in the survey. This is 9 spots lower than last year’s WHR report, where the country ranked 52nd with a 6.006 score.

Finland tops the chart as the happiest country in the world with a 7.842 score, followed by Denmark (7.620), Switzerland (7.571), Iceland (7.554), and the Netherlands (7.464). You may refer below for the complete list of Happiness Rankings for 2021.

2020 Happiness Ranking Factors

Paying attention to specific daily emotions to track how COVID-19 has affected different aspects of life, the ranking of happiness was measured based on three factors:

Life Evaluations

Respondents of the Gallup World Poll were asked to evaluate their current life as a whole using the image of a ladder, with 10 as the best possible life for them and 0 as the worst. “Income, health, having someone to count on, having a sense of freedom to make key life decisions, generosity, and the absence of corruption all play strong roles in supporting life evaluations. Confidence in public institutions also plays an important role.”

Positive Emotions

The researchers asked the respondents whether they smiled or laughed a lot yesterday and whether they experienced enjoyment during a lot of the day yesterday.

Negative Emotions

The study measures the negative effect by asking if respondents have experienced worry, sadness, and anger, during a lot of the day yesterday.

For this year, researchers have also isolated 2020 data to see how life evaluations and emotions have evolved in the year COVID-19 became a pandemic. Philippines landed the 74th spot out of the 95 countries surveyed in 2020 with a score of 5.080. This is lower compared to the 42nd spot the Philippines has ranked in during the 2017-2019 results, a reflection of the pre-pandemic situation.

Global resilience amid the pandemic

Global life evaluations have
shown remarkable resilience
in the face of COVID-19.

-World Happiness Report 2021

According to the WHR, the 2020 data was combined with 2018 and 2019 scores just as they normally would in the previous reports to find out if there was a drastic change in the rankings because of the pandemic.

Comparing the 2017-2019 rankings and 2018-2020 data for the 95 countries, the rank correlation of 0.99 shows that COVID-19 only had a modest effect on the overall rankings which reflects the global nature of the pandemic and the widely shared resilience in the face of it.

The study also shows that positive emotions, with a global average of 0.71, are almost three times more frequent than negative emotions (0.27 global average).

Ranking of Happiness 2018-2020

SOURCE: World Happiness Report 2021