World Happiness Report: Philippines ranks 69th

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines has climbed two notches in the latest World Happiness Report released by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).

The country ranked 69th, up from last year’s 71st, out of 156 nations included in the report, which used three-year data gathered by the United States-based analytics and advisory company Gallup Inc.

The report, released on Wednesday, also showed that the Philippines ranked 12th among countries that showed the highest increase in the level of happiness between the periods of 2005 to 2008 and 2016 to 2018.

Like last year, the top four spots in this year’s report were occupied by European countries Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland.

Completing the top 10 are Netherlands (fifth, up from sixth), Switzerland (sixth, down from fifth), Sweden (seventh, up from ninth), New Zealand (eighth, down from sixth), Canada (ninth, down from seventh) and Austria (10th, up from 12th).

Meanwhile, the 10 countries identified as the least happy are South Sudan, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Rwanda, Yemen, Malawi, Syria, Botswana and Haiti.

According to the SDSN, this year’s report analyzed how life evaluations and emotions, both positive and negative, have evolved over the whole run of the Gallup World Poll.

It looked at how happiness has evolved over the past dozen years, with a focus on technologies, social norms, conflicts and government policies that have driven those changes.

The organization said world happiness has fallen in recent years when the population growth is factored in, citing sustained downward trend in India. 

“As for emotions, there has been a widespread recent upward trend in negative affect, comprising worry, sadness and anger, especially marked in Asia and Africa, and more recently elsewhere,” it added.

In Southeast Asia, the Philippines ranked third after Singapore (34th) and Thailand (52nd).

Following the Philippines are Malaysia (80th), Indonesia (92nd), Vietnam (94th), Laos (105th), Cambodia (109th) and Myanmar (131st).

SDSN director Jeffrey Sachs said the report could offer “the world’s governments and individuals the opportunity to rethink public policies as well as individual life choices, to raise happiness and wellbeing.”

“We are in an era of rising tensions and negative emotions and these findings point to underlying challenges that need to be addressed,” he added.

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

The rankings are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the poll, which asked respondents to rate their current lives on the scale of zero to 10.

Data from the years 2016 to 2018 were combined to make the sample size large enough to reduce random sampling errors, with the typical annual sample set at 1,000 people.

The report, produced by the SDSN in partnership with the Ernesto Illy Foundation, was written by a group of independent experts in their personal capacities.