How countries can achieve the best quality of life - and it has little to do with the economy

There are some basic life necessities which improve as the economy does. Namely: water access, sanitation, and nutrition.

These quality of life indicators improve as GDP improves, which makes sense — healthcare, water infrastructure, and basic education cost a lot of money to implement, especially if the country is large.

In fact all of the top 20 countries in the SPI were developed nations because their economies allowed their citizens these basic requirements.

This is where things get more complicated.

Personal Safety, for instance, has a far less clear relationship to the economy. Russia is an obvious example of this discrepancy: it has relatively high GDP but also a serious crime problem and only scores 58.15 on this index.

Meanwhile India, whose economy is growing so quickly people are already calling it a superpower, scores just 54.33 on access to information, and a relatively mediocre 80.23 on basic education — showing that even a huge economy can struggle to support a population that big.

There are more abstract — but still important — quality of life indicators which are less affected by the economy.

"Tolerance and Inclusion" is clearly a big deal for certain subsections of a society, and the Social Progress Index shows that rich and poor countries are all over the chart against GDP. Japan only scored 56.75 here, not much more than highly conservative Kuwait.

"Personal Rights," which includes freedom of speech and freedom to protest are also all over the chart, with countries either scoring highly or poorly with little in between. Saudi Arabia, which has a massive GDP, scored an appalling 9.10 in this index.

But where the correlation between social progress and economic strength seems to disappear altogether is "Environmental Quality" and "Health and Wellness."

Rapidly growing economies like China and India scored poorly on air quality — at 52.86 and 48.03 respectively — while the US was not much better at 75.73.

Even more important is "Health and Wellness," which measures life expectancy, obesity rates, and number of suicides. These have almost no relationship to an economy, with wildly different GDP levels all measuring at similar social progress indexes. France and the UK, for example, only score around 71 here.

The two charts show a mess of dots — representing countries — that has no correlation to the GDP figure running along the bottom.

This means that the economy makes almost no difference on a country's environmental quality and health and wellness, even though these are massively important Standard of Living indicators.

So which countries score well on the Social Progress Index relative to their small GDPs?

Costa Rica is the top performer compared to the size of its economy, followed by Kyrgyzstan and Moldova — but in the case of the latter two the SPI report says it may be an indication of their declining economies rather than an active attempt on the part of the governments to make the societies more progressive.

On the other side, the top 4 countries which perform poorly despite decent — or even great —economies are all Middle Eastern.

In fact Middle Eastern and North African nations make up 9 of the top 23, with many developing and resource-rich nations making up the rest.

Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway all landed in the top 10 of the Social Progress Index report. They have decent economies but, more importantly, strive to give a high standard of life to all of their citizens.

By taking care of basics like education, water, sanitation, and medical care, but also offering opportunity, tolerance, and personal rights — things money alone cannot buy.