What Is the Quality of Life Index?
How much a person has in terms of money, land, and material wealth varies within cultures as well as from one culture to the next. However, just describing people's economic well-being is not enough to assess how happy or satisfied they are. For that determination, more factors must be taken into account. Some economists and other social scientists have manipulated these factors to derive a measurement called the quality of life index.
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Identification
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Social scientists, such as economists and psychologists who want to compare data that include several variables, often create an index. To measure how satisfied people are with their lives, and to contrast this satisfaction among various nations, they created an index called the quality of life index. There are several different ways to calculate a quality of life index using different factors, surveys, and measurements, which result in slightly different conclusions.
History
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The Economist Intelligence Unit created a quality of life index after experimenting with an informal survey. First it evaluated the "material well being" of a nation by dividing its gross domestic product by its population size. Then it factored in the answers to a survey for which there was just one question. Asked how satisfied a respondent was with life "in general," the person gave one of four answers: "very satisfied," "fairly satisfied," "not satisfied," or "not at all satisfied." The Unit wondered if this subjective assessment would match a calculation based on a series of socioeconomic indicators.
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Features
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In 2005, "The Economist" published its first report based on a calculable quality of life index. The journal staff combined nine factors, again starting with a nation's gross domestic product divided by its population size, to measure economic well being. For each nation the staff added the life expectancy from birth, the divorce rate per thousand people, and the unemployment rate. Then it assigned a measure of the nation's political stability and its political freedom and whether men and women get paid equivalent wages for the same jobs. To assess the level of "community life," The Economist analyzed whether either average church attendance or union membership is high. Finally, it assigned a higher value to nations with warmer climates based on their latitude.
Significance
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Using this quality of life index, in 2005 "The Economist" published its finding that Ireland is the nation with the highest quality of life, followed by Switzerland, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Australia. The United States ranked thirteenth and Zimbabwe, preceded by Haiti, came last.
Theories/Speculation
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Another set of indicators is used to derive a quality of life index by the journal "International Living." This magazine assigns percentages to its analysis of the value of each nation's cost of living, economy, infrastructure, culture, leisure, environment, health, safety versus risk, and climate. By this calculation, the nation with the highest quality of life in 2009 is France. The same nation ranked first, according to this index, each year for the previous four.
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