Build your own quality of life index, and see where you could live

The OECD is making available to the general public an interactive tool that allows us to construct our own quality of life index. The tool is part of a broader effort called the Better Life Initiative, which aims to measure a variety of quality of life metrics, well beyond GDP alone.

This tool compares the results of 40 countries belonging to the OECD, on the following 11 fields:

1. Housing conditions
2. Income and wealth
3. Employment
4. Social ties
5. Education
6. Environment
7. Civic engagement and governance
8. Health
9. Well-beingbeing
10. Safety
11. Work-life balance

Each country is represented by a flower, each of whose 11 petals represents one of the fields mentioned. The user has the possibility to modulate the importance of the different fields on a scale from 1 to 5. Each time the user makes a change, the order of the different countries changes. One can choose to display the ranking of countries in alphabetical order, or by rank in the overall ranking.

Overall, regardless of the settings made, the order of countries changes little. But their position on the 1-10 scale does change.

We can also look in detail at the performance of each country or each field. For example, we will see that Iceland is the best country for social connections, Finland wins for education, while Canada holds that spot for health.

This tool was complemented by a book entitled How's Life? Measuring Well-Being, freely available in .pdf.

The interactive quality of life measurement tool is available in 7 languages. Its clear visual interface makes it easy to use.