After falling four places last year, Jamaica has made a massive, 23-spot jump in the World Happiness Report for 2021, ranking 37th out of 149 countries globally.

The 2021 World Happiness Report, released on Friday (March 19), found that Jamaica had the best of three rankings within the Caribbean with a 6.309 score out of a potential 10 points. The other two Caribbean countries making the global cut were Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Interestingly, in its note on Jamaica, the World Happiness Report said it did not have any 2020 data on the island, instead choosing the country’s average based on the 2018-2019 surveys.

Countries ranked in the World Happiness Report were graded on a scale of zero (signalling the worst possible life) and 10 (perceived as the best possible life).

According to the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which publishes the report, the 2021 ranking sought to ascertain what effects the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had on global ways of life and how people all over the world fared.

“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,” the report stated.

The report measured subjective well-being by relying on three main indicators: life evaluations, positive emotions, and negative emotions.

To measure life evaluations, the Gallup World Poll, which remains the principal source of data for the report in its ninth year, asked people to evaluate their current life using the image of a ladder. The best possible life was marked with a 10 and worst possible corresponding with a zero.

According to the report, life evaluations provide the most informative measure for international comparisons because they capture the quality of life “in a more complete and stable way than emotional reports based on daily experiences.”

Positive emotions were captured in the report by asking respondents whether they smiled or laughed a lot the previous day. An affirmative response is coded as a ‘1’ while a negative response is coded as ‘0’ and the average response is calculated for each person.

On the other hand, negative emotions are measured by asking respondents whether they experienced specific negative emotions a lot on the same day.

With a 5.89 score in 2019, where the island was ranked 56th out of 132 countries, Jamaica fell to 60th in 2020 despite maintaining no change in its figure among 153 territories reviewed.

Finland returned as the world’s happiest country, followed closely by Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden and Holland rounding out the top five. Contrastingly, Afghanistan remained last in the happiness ranking at 149th, with Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Botswana and Lesotho also at the bottom.