(Daily News Scan - DNS English) World Happiness Report 2020
A couple of days ago on 20th of March World Happiness Report 2020 was released. This report is released every year by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations. It is a survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be.
In this DNS we will know about the Happiness Report and the rankings of the countries.
The World Happiness Report 2020 is the 8th edition of this report. March 20th was designated as the World Happiness Day by the UN General Assembly in 2012. The preparation of the first World Happiness Report was based in the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The central base for the reports has since 2013 been the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and The Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
The World Happiness Reports have been based on a wide variety of data, the most important source has always been the Gallup World Poll. The life evaluations from the Gallup World Poll provide the basis for the annual happiness rankings. Gallup World Poll, focuses on six variables: GDP Per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and absence of corruption.
The central purpose of the report is to review the science of measuring and understanding subjective wellbeing and to use survey measures of life satisfaction to track the quality of lives as they are being lived in more than 150 countries. The special focus of the World Happiness Report 2020 is environments for happiness. For the first time in the 2020 report, cities around the world were ranked by their subjective wellbeing and looked into how the social, urban and natural environments combine to affect happiness.
Now let us know about the rankings of the countries.
Finland has been for the third time ranked as the World’s Happiest Nation. This was followed by Denmark and Switzerland on the 2nd and 3rd positions respectively. Among the least happy nations of the world were countries like Afghanistan, South Sudan AND Zimbabwe.
Talking about our country India, the ranking previously was 140 which dropped down this year to 144. If we compare the rankings of India to its neighbouring nations it can be said the rankings are not that good. India is among the bottom 20 countries in this list. The neighbouring nations like NEPAL ranked 92, Pakistan ranked 66, Bangladesh ranked 107, and Sri Lanka ranked at 130.
Now let us know few points on Sustainable Development Solution Network (SDSN).
The Sustainable Development Solution Network has been operating since the year 2012. It works under the United Nations to support the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change. SDSN is guided by a leadership council which bring together global sustainable development leaders from all regions and all sector including civil society, public and private sectors.
