Money can’t buy happiness
Smaller countries are topping rankings of global health
● There’s more to life than money, and economists know it. As new assessments of global living standards proliferate, attempting to gauge how healthy, happy and successful humans are depending on where they live, a pattern is slowly emerging.
Though slight variations in data can throw up different winners, smaller countries are increasingly dominating the top of the lists while big countries with booming economies fall behind.
A new analysis, the Global Wellness Index published by investment firm Letter One, ranks Canada as the best country out of the 151 countries evaluated. The US trails far behind, coming in at 37.
In a tighter ranking of G20 nations combined with the 20 most populous countries on the planet, SA comes in dead last, below Ukraine, Egypt and Iraq.
Based on a basket of metrics ranging from government health-care spending to rates of depression, alcohol use, smoking, happiness and exercise, the new index is the latest attempt by economists to evaluate the world beyond economic growth. Last month, Bloomberg’s own research named Spain the world’s healthiest country.
A common thread in both surveys, and others like them, is that the top ranks are increasingly filled with smaller countries. This may be tied to researchers developing new metrics for the modern world, measures that don’t necessarily correlate economic health with actual health — let alone wellness — at the expense of more nuanced barometers.
“The old concerns about growth — that it does not include every country, or every person in growing countries — are ever present,” said Richard Davies, a former Bank of England and UK Treasury economist who compiled the Global Wellness Index.
Davies’s dashboard ranks Canada highly due to its good scores for blood pressure, life expectancy and government health-care spending, but it also pays close attention to the country’s high happiness levels.
SA, once a beacon of economic growth, scores poorly for life expectancy, alcohol use, depression and diabetes.
Several major economies struggle when ranked against smaller, healthier countries. The global top 10 includes large countries such as the Philippines and South Korea, but also finds room for Oman, Iceland, the Maldives, the Netherlands and Singapore.
While rich countries tend to lead, many emerging economies score more highly Richard Davies
Economist who compiled the Global Wellness Index
The UK was ranked 15th, held back by high rates of obesity and inactivity. Big countries such as Japan, Germany, France and Italy failed to make the top 25, with all four faring poorly for rates of high blood pressure. Middle Eastern countries ranked high due to good scores in the alcohol category.
The US was hampered by obesity, depression, inactivity and other items, Davies said.
The index focuses on 10 key metrics: blood pressure, blood glucose, obesity, depression, happiness, alcohol use, tobacco use, exercise, healthy life expectancy and government spending on health care.
Data was gleaned from standard sources including the World Health Organisation’s Global Health Observatory and the UN, as well as the “World Happiness Report”.
Countries are ranked from the weakest to the strongest across every metric. Any with more than one missing data point were excluded, leaving 151 in the final rankings.
Additionally, G20 nations were ranked alongside the “P20” nations with the highest populations, to produce a list that excludes small countries but covers more than 95% of the global population.
“While rich countries tend to lead, many emerging economies score more highly than some advanced nations. This is down to huge increases in life expectancy in recent years,” Davies said, pointing also to high rates of depression and obesity in advanced countries.
“The low scores for countries like SA — an economy lauded for its growth rate in the 2000s — shows that simply ranking an economy based on traditional economic metrics like GDP alone can miss important parts of the story when it comes to the wellbeing of a nation.”
Economies of the future may end up being judged on three levels, Davies said. Those could include traditional measures of the whole economy, such as GDP and employment rates; indicators that point to how equitable and fair a country is; and a new layer including measures of health, happiness and wellbeing.