Are you happy where you live? It鈥檚 a tricky enough question to answer on an individual, subjective level, and harder still when it comes to arriving at an objective judgement. There are so many factors to take into account. Is access to healthcare more important than pollution levels? Should low crime rates be counted a higher priority than freedom of speech?
Economists sometimes use a country鈥檚 per capita gross domestic product 鈥� the value of all the goods and services it produces 鈥� as an indicator of quality of life, but it is only a crude one. To give a more rounded picture, the UN produces an annual 鈥渉uman development index鈥�, which assigns a score to each nation based on three broad sets of indicators: health and longevity, knowledge and education, and standard of living measured by purchasing power.
By these measures the worst place to live is Niger in west Africa, where life expectancy is 44.6 years, 71 per cent of adults are illiterate and 79 per cent of children don鈥檛 go to school. In the top nation, Norway, people are 40 times wealthier, live almost twice as long and enjoy near universal education.
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The UN鈥檚 method has two big flaws, though. First, some nations where life is undoubtedly tough are unwilling or unable to provide the necessary data, notably Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, Somalia and North Korea. Equally importantly, there鈥檚 more to well-being than a long, prosperous life. Norway may be top of the UN chart, but it surely can鈥檛 be that much fun living in a country where winter can bring a mean monthly temperature of -15 掳C, the sun does not rise for two months of the year, and you鈥檒l need a second mortgage to buy a drink in a bar.
Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, says that while the UN鈥檚 indicators clearly give some idea of quality of life, ultimately the only way to find out how happy people are is to ask. He has created a ranking of global happiness based on the results of surveys in 90 nations, which reveals that the country where people are least happy to live is Tanzania (perhaps reflecting the fact that the country was ravaged by drought at the time of the survey) closely followed by Zimbabwe.
Much of Africa and the Middle East does not figure in Veenhoven鈥檚 survey, but later this year, market research firm Gallup will release a survey with a slightly wider reach, covering around 120 countries. It should at least bring us a little closer to a definitive assessment of the last place on Earth anyone would want to live.
