Your Better Life Index is designed to let you visualise and compare some of the key factors – like education, housing, environment, and so on – that contribute to well-being in OECD countries. It’s an interactive tool that allows you to see how countries perform according to the importance you give to each of 11 topics that make for a better life.
The video is also available in: French, German, Italian, Spanish
There’s been a lot of debate lately on measuring the well-being of societies – is wealth all that matters, or should we be looking at other things, like the balance between work and the rest of our lives? The Index aims to involve citizens in this debate, and to empower them to become more informed and engaged in the policy-making process that shapes all our lives.
Since it was founded in 1961, the OECD has helped governments design better policies for better lives for their citizens. More recently, the OECD has been keenly involved in the debate on measuring well-being. Based on this experience, these 11 topics reflect what the OECD has identified as essential to well-being in terms of material living conditions (housing, income, jobs) and quality of life (community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance).
Each topic is built on one to three specific indicators: For example, the Work-Life Balance topic is based on three separate measures: the number of employees working long hours; the percentage of working mothers; and the time people devote to leisure and personal activities.
In the future, these indicators reflecting current material living conditions and quality of life will be complemented by indicators describing sustainability of well-being over time.
The 34 countries are the members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, which brings together most of the world’s developed economies and a number of emerging economies. Over time, the Index will expand to cover the OECD’s six partner countries: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa.
That’s up to you! The OECD has not assigned rankings to countries. Instead, Your Better Life Index is designed to let you, the user, investigate how each of the 11 topics can contribute to well-being. If you think Housing is more important than Environment, for example, just change the ratings in Your Better Life Index toolbar and instantly see how countries compare. When you’ve created your own Index, click “Share this Index” to show it to your friends and further the debate on what makes for a better life.
Every time you create an Index, it will enter a publicly accessible database. Over time, this will help the OECD to build up a picture of what you, citizens from across the world, believe shapes a good life. In the future, we will use this data to allow online visitors to cross-compare their Better Life Indexes with other people from around the world.
Lots! There are three main areas of information:
Each of the 11 topics of the Index is currently based on one to three indicators. Within each topic, the indicators are averaged with equal weights.
Download the full list of indicators and underlying data.
The indicators have been chosen on the basis of a number of statistical criteria such as relevance (face-validity, depth, policy relevance) and data quality (predictive validity, coverage, timeliness, cross-country comparability etc.) and in consultation with OECD member countries. These indicators are good measures of the concepts of well-being, in particular in the context of a country comparative exercise. Other indicators will gradually be added to each topic.
However, some countries and cultures may include in the definition and measurement of well-being additional aspects which are relevant to their context and history (e.g. spirituality). Thus, while the OECD framework covers dimensions of well-being that are universal and relevant for all human beings, it may be usefully complemented by national similar initiatives which can add context-specific information on what constitutes a good life.
Well-being is a multidimensional concept that deserves a multidimensional measure. However, extracting a single story from a very complex picture can be challenging. The advantage of composite indices is that they can provide an easy-to-read overview of well-being patterns.
The 11 topics of well-being used in the Index have been chosen in accordance with theory, practice and consultation on the issue of how to best measure well-being from a comparative perspective. Read about this in greater detail in our companion publication, How's Life? - Measuring Well-Being. From a statistical point of view, the Index relies on best practices for building composite indicators. The Index is robust to various methodological assumptions.
The data mostly come from official sources such as the OECD or National Accounts, United Nations Statistics, National Statistics Offices. A couple of indicators are based on data from the Gallup World Poll a division of the Gallup Organization that regularly conducts public opinion polls in more than 140 countries around the world. More than 80% of the indicators in Your Better Life Index have been already published by the OECD.
Read about this in greater detail in our companion publication, How's Life? - Measuring Well-Being.
At the moment, most of the indicators entering the Better Life Index are not available at a more disaggregated level; in other words, they don’t allow comparisons of disparities within a country or between various social groups (e.g. men vs. women, youth vs. elderly, etc.) Depending on data availability, future editions of the Index may have this feature.
No. At the moment Your Better Life Index only evaluates quality of life and living condition for an average individual or household, representative of the country where she is living. This is due to the fact that building an Index for various groups of the population requires having indicators which are broken down by various people’s characteristics (e.g. age, gender, education, etc). Unfortunately this information does not exist for all the indicators used in Your Better Life Index. The OECD is working to fill these gaps and future editions of the Index may contain information for subgroups of the population.
The topics of the Index have been chosen to correspond to the essential components of well-being in many countries and culture around the world. It is however possible that there are additional things which matter to your life and do not feature in the Index (e.g. religion, having children, etc). We encourage you to use our contact page to let us know of any additional topics that you would like to see included in future editions of Your Better Life Index. If data allow it, we will take into account this information.
For now, the Index is only available for 2009 or so. It is thus not possible to look at the evolution of well-being over time. The OECD plans to update Index regularly. In a few years time it will thus be possible to look at whether and how well-being has changed.
The web application that builds the Index requires some default weights at the start. For simplicity, these weights have been set equal to the grade of 1 for all topics. These default weights do not represent the OECD’s view on the relative importance of each topic.
Weights are assigned by the users, who build and customise their own Index. To do so, users have to rate each topic from 0 (“not important”) to 5 (“very important”). The score given to each topic is converted into a weight, by dividing the grade given to each topic by the sum of the grades given to all topics. For example, if a user assigns of a score of 5 to Health and Education and 3 to all the other topics, their Index will weigh health and education by a factor of 5/37 (i.e. around 13.5%) and all the other topics by a factor of 3/37 (i.e. around 8.1%). The sum of all weights is 100%.
Each topic of well-being is measured by one to three indicators. Within each topic, indicators are averaged with equal weights. For instance education is measured through educational attainment and reading skills. The education score will thus be given by:
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educational attainment score + reading skills score
2
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The Index gathers many indicators, expressed on very different units (dollars, years, etc). To compare and aggregate values expressed in different unities, the values have to be normalised.
This normalisation is done according to a standard formula which converts the original values of the indicators into numbers varying in a range between 0 (for the worst possible outcome) and 1 (for the best possible outcome). The formula is:
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value to convert - minimum value
maximum value - minimum value
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When an indicator measures a negative component of well-being (e.g. unemployment) the formula used is:
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value to convert - minimum value
maximum value - minimum value
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For a very small number of observations (less than 5% of the data), the values used to compute Your Better Life Index rely on imputed values. Imputed values refer to estimates of missing data points that are carried out through specific statistical techniques. Although these imputations do not significantly affect the results of the Index, estimated values have to be taken with caution.
Designed and created by Moritz Stefaner, Jonas Leist and Timm Kekeritz (for Raureif design consultancy, Berlin)
