Annex - Using a New Global Urban-Rural Definition, Called the Degree of Urbanisation, to Assess Happiness

The long-standing lack of a global definition of urban and rural areas is an obstacle to reliably comparing these areas across national borders. Six international organisations (EU, FAO, ILO, OECD, UN-Habitat and World Bank) have developed a new harmonised definition that can be applied to every country in the world, called the Degree of Urbanisation. This work has been endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission on 5 March 2020. The present annex to the World Happiness Report (WHR), compares the results of chapter 4 of the WHR - Urban-Rural Happiness Differentials across the World – that discusses happiness differences between urban or rural areas as those are perceived and reported by the respondents of the Gallup World Poll survey. As an alternative, in the annex, this new method, the Degree of Urbanisation has been used: Instead of relying on only two classes, the new method uses three classes to capture the urban-rural continuum: 1) Cities, 2) Towns and semi-dense areas and 3) Rural areas.