The data

So what I’ve done? I’ve gathered every useful index available on various aspects of the country and ran some data analysis on the relationships between it.

There are quite a few indexes that I’ve found useful:

Quality of Life:

World Happiness Report — measures happiness (doh) by combining multiple surveys and social factors.

Human Development Index — includes things like life expectancy, education, and per capita income.

Social Progress Index — measures the extent to which countries provide for the social and environmental needs of their citizens.

Legatum Prosperity Index — the ranking is based on a variety of factors including wealth, economic growth, education, health, personal well-being, and quality of life.

Education Index

These are going to be useful to define the quality of life in the country. In the end, these are the things that matter for a regular citizen in the country.

Economy:

Most of the above define an economic environment of the country. Is it easy to open a business? How effective is the economy?

Also, there are some other more or less well-known metrics such as:

I chose to ignore things like Personal Tax Rate and Corporate Tax Rate as they are reported in the laws as often it is a progressive rate and just its highest rate is reported. The factual taxes on Income and Goods and Services as they are reported at the World Bank looks like a much better representation of the taxation level.

Next, I’ve put all of the countries in the spreadsheet and kept trimming the list down, until I was left with 75 countries that had data on all of the indexes mentioned above.

This introduced a certain bias that pre-filtered only the countries that are capable of tracking lots of different aspects of their life, but it also helped to remove certain outliers like authoritarian regimes, extremely underdeveloped countries, etc.

All of the data I’ve used is available in this spreadsheet on GDrive.