Money doesn’t always buy happiness

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.

While 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 Letterone, ranks Canada as the best country out of the 151 nations evaluated. The US trails far behind, coming in at 37.

In a tighter ranking of G20 nations combined with the 20 most populous countries, South Africa comes in dead last, below Ukraine, Egypt and Iraq.

Based on a basket of metrics ranging from government healthcare 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 research came up with Spain as 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 other, 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 healthcare spending, but it also pays close attention to the country’s high happiness levels.

South Africa, once a beacon of economic growth, scores poorly for life expectancy, alcohol use, depression and diabetes.

In the overall list, several major economies struggle when ranked against smaller, healthier countries. The global top 10 includes large nations such as the Philippines and South Korea, but also finds room for Oman, Iceland, Maldives, Netherlands and Singapore.

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 survey’s global top 25, with all four faring poorly for rates of high blood pressure.

The Middle Eastern countries ranked relatively high due to good scores in the alcohol category.

The US was hampered by excessive obesity, depression, inactivity and other items, Davies said.

“The low scores for countries like South Africa, 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,” Davies said. |