Warren Buffett,
probably the world’s most successful investor, has said that anything good that
happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right
country, the United States, at the right time (1930). A quarter of a century ago,
when The World in 1988 light-heartedly
ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born in
1988, America indeed came top. But which country is the best for a baby
born in 2013?
To answer this, the
Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has this time turned deadly serious. It earnestly
attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a
healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.
Its quality-of-life
index links the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys—how happy
people say they are—to objective determinants of the quality of life across
countries. Being rich helps more than anything else, but it is not all that
counts; things like crime, trust in public institutions and the health of
family life matter too. In all, the index takes 11 statistically significant
indicators into account. They are a mixed bunch: some are fixed factors, such
as geography; others change only very slowly over time (demography, many social
and cultural characteristics); and some factors depend on policies and the
state of the world economy.
