World Happiness Report 2021: Sri Lanka ranks 129 out of 149

Sri Lanka ranked 129 out of 149 countries in the World Happiness Report 2021, released by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network on Friday.

Finland was ranked the happiest country in the world,a feat the Nordic nation achieved for the fourth consecutive year.

The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 149 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be.

The World Happiness Report 2021 focuses on the effects of Covid-19 and how people all over the world have fared.

The annual report ranks nations based on gross domestic product per person, healthy life expectancy and the opinions of residents. Surveys ask respondents to indicate on a 1-10 scale how much social support they feel they have if something goes wrong, their freedom to make their own life choices, their sense of how corrupt their society is and how generous they are.

“Our aim was two-fold, 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. In particular, we try to explain why some countries have done so much better than others,” it said in a statement.