What makes a country successful?
Heyo, I’m Toni. I usually work as a developer on the Datawrapper app, but this week I took a look at how we measure wealth, efficiency, and success, and what difference the lens through which we look at these can make.
When trying to figure out how wealthy or successful a certain country is, we often turn to gross domestic product (GDP). As an indicator of economic activity, it measures the total monetary value of all products and services produced in a given country each year. What it doesn’t really measure is how well people in a country are doing, nor how much money they make. As a result, GDP can grow, even when many people are losing their jobs or feeling less satisfied with their lives.
GDP has many flaws. It doesn’t account for wealth inequality and unpaid work, which is disproportionately done by women. For example, if a family hires someone for childcare, that counts toward the GDP, while it doesn’t count when a parent stays at home to do the same work. It also doesn’t account for environmental damage or people's well-being and health.
This is why researchers have been trying to come up with other measures of success. For example:
the Genuine Progress Indicator which includes income distribution and non-market goods, like household labor and volunteer work, while subtracting social costs like crime, inequality and environmental damage.
the Inclusive Wealth Index which measures an economy’s total stock of capital. Besides produced capital like machines and infrastructure, it also takes into account human capital like skills and health, and natural capital like forests, minerals and atmosphere.
The index we’ll be looking at today, though, is called the Happy Planet Index.
Happy Planet Index
The Happy Planet Index (HPI) tries to measure the “important things”, which for most people, according to surveys, are health and happiness.
To measure these, the HPI uses life expectancy in years and self-reported well-being on a scale from 0-10 as proxies. (The self-reported well-being numbers come from the same dataset Daniela has already taken a look at in a previous Weekly Chart.) These numbers then get divided by a country’s ecological footprint in the form of the surface area of the planet required to sustain a country’s consumption patterns. It’s a more comprehensive number than plain carbon footprint, as it also considers the land required to provide renewable resources, and the area occupied by infrastructure. It also accounts for imports and exports, so for example if you buy something from China to consume it in your home country, it counts towards your country’s footprint, not China’s.
By dividing wellbeing values by ecological footprint, the index can address a more complex question: “Which countries are efficient with the planet’s resources, while also bringing happiness to their population?”
What is sobering is that no country is currently able to maintain what the researchers call sustainable well-being, which would be high life expectancy and high life satisfaction scores within reasonable environmental limits. However, some countries are closer than others.
Costa Rica, for example, ranks pretty consistently on top of the HPI rankings, and that’s not by accident. Most of the country's energy comes from renewables. It got rid of its army in the late 1940s, meaning it could spend that money on education and health instead. Big parts of the country are under nature protection, and the government works together with indigenous tribes to maintain them. Costa Rica abandoned the global North’s idea of progress in order to better serve their population and the planet.
Spain is in fourth place, highest in the European Union and among high-income countries worldwide. That is thanks to the lowest ecological footprint per capita in Western Europe, as it made conscious moves towards renewables. Germany is also pretty far up at 16th place, climbing up from 46th in 2007 due to higher life expectancy, higher well-being scores, and a lower ecological footprint.
No one measure can answer everything
The HPI is by no means a perfect measure. For example, it doesn’t include wealth inequality either, much like GDP, which is pretty high in Costa Rica. So it’s not intended to replace GDP one-to-one in policy-making, as the researchers behind it actually think no one indicator should ever dominate economic discourse like the GDP has over the last eight decades. Focusing on GDP alone has misled us into believing economic activity and growth are the only important measures of progress, while it doesn’t even measure what we consider most important.
The HPI is more about opening up the conversation and offering an alternative lens through which to view the world. It shows that a good life doesn’t have to cost the Earth. It proposes that the economy should work towards our collective well-being rather than perpetual economic growth.
While it’s not meant to be a GDP replacement, it’s still interesting to compare the rich countries to the “happy and fair” ones:
Consumption can't buy happiness
The research also shows that more consumption doesn’t make you happier. High-carbon lifestyles are actually associated with lower life satisfaction and shorter life expectancy, while sustainable behaviors such as lower consumption, reduced meat intake, and active transportation correlate with better well-being outcomes. Sustainable lifestyles are not only possible but desirable.
What’s also interesting is the gendered differences. In a previous Weekly Chart by Linus, we already saw that women live longer than men. Based on a limited sample of countries, researchers behind the HPI found that countries led by women seem to score better, women tend to have a smaller ecological footprint in Europe, and in Germany, the footprint from transport is 50% higher for men than for women. 🚗 💨
If you are interested in learning more about the Happy Planet Index, I highly recommend checking out the report and the data. You can even calculate your own personal HPI score, which pairs your data to the most similar country from the dataset. My score came out at 61.3, and its components are closest to Thailand. We both have pretty good health and wellbeing scores, but our carbon footprints still exceed the fair consumption limits.
I hope this article gave you a new lens through which to view success! It was inspired by and based on this video by Martin Oetting. Check back next week for a new Weekly Chart by our vis developer Elliot!
