Quality of Life Index (higher is better) is an estimation of overall quality of life by using an empirical formula which takes into account purchasing power index (higher is better), pollution index (lower is better), house price to income ratio (lower is better), cost of living index (lower is better), safety index (higher is better), health care index (higher is better), traffic commute time index (lower is better) and climate index (higher is better).

Current formula (written in Java programming language):

index.main = Math.max(0, 100 + purchasingPowerInclRentIndex / 2.5 - (housePriceToIncomeRatio * 1.0) - costOfLivingIndex / 10 + safetyIndex / 2.0 + healthIndex / 2.5 - trafficTimeIndex / 2.0 - pollutionIndex * 2.0 / 3.0 + climateIndex / 3.0);

For details how purchasing power (including rent) index, pollution index, property price to income ratios, cost of living index, safety index, climate index, health index and traffic index are calculated please look up their respective pages.

Formulas used in the past

Formula used between June 2017 and Decembar 2017

We decided to decrease weight from costOfLivingIndex in this formula:

index.main = Math.max(0, 100 + purchasingPowerInclRentIndex / 2.5 - (housePriceToIncomeRatio * 1.0) - costOfLivingIndex / 5 + safetyIndex / 2.0 + healthIndex / 2.5 - trafficTimeIndex / 2.0 - pollutionIndex * 2.0 / 3.0 + climateIndex / 3.0);

The World Happiness 2017, which ranks 155 countries by their happiness levels, was released at the United Nations at an event celebrating International Day of Happiness on March 20th. The report continues to gain global recognition as governments, organizations and civil society increasingly use happiness indicators to inform their policy-making decisions. Leading experts across fields – economics, psychology, survey analysis, national statistics, health, public policy and more – describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations. The reports review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.

The scores are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the poll. This question, known as the Cantril ladder, asks respondents to think of a ladder with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a 0 and to rate their own current lives on that scale. The scores are from nationally representative samples for 2017 and use the Gallup weights to make the estimates representative. The columns following the happiness score estimate the extent to which each of six factors – economic production, social support, life expectancy, freedom, absence of corruption, and generosity – contribute to making life evaluations higher in each country than they are in Dystopia, a hypothetical country that has values equal to the world’s lowest national averages for each of the six factors. They have no impact on the total score reported for each country, but they do explain why some countries rank higher than others.

Quality of life index, link: https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/indices_explained.jsp

Happiness store, link: https://www.kaggle.com/unsdsn/world-happiness/home

Luxembourg stands out as the European leader in quality of life for 2025, achieving a score of 220 on the Quality of Life Index. The Netherlands follows closely behind with 211 points, while Albania and Ukraine rank at the bottom with scores of 104 and 115 respectively. This index provides a thorough assessment of living conditions across Europe, reflecting various factors that shape the overall well-being of populations and extending beyond purely economic metrics. Understanding the quality of life index The quality of life index is a multifaceted measure that incorporates factors such as purchasing power, pollution levels, housing affordability, cost of living, safety, healthcare quality, traffic conditions, and climate, to measure the overall quality of life of a Country. Higher overall index scores indicate better living conditions. However, in subindexes such as pollution, cost of living, and traffic commute time, lower values correspond to improved quality of life. Challenges affecting life satisfaction Despite the fact that European countries register high levels of life quality by for example leading the ranking of happiest countries in the world, life satisfaction across the European Union has been on a downward trend since 2018. The EU's overall life satisfaction score dropped from 7.3 out of 10 in 2018 to 7.1 in 2022. This decline can be attributed to various factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic and economic challenges such as high inflation. Rising housing costs, in particular, have emerged as a critical concern, significantly affecting quality of life. This issue has played a central role in shaping voter priorities for the European Parliamentary Elections in 2024 and becoming one of the most pressing challenges for Europeans, profoundly influencing both daily experiences and long-term well-being.

Link: https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/region_rankings.jsp?title=2018&region=021

Data was initially taken from Numbeo as an aggregation of user voting.

• Quality of Life Index varies from 0 (bad quality) to 190 (top good quality)

This dataset is one of the public parts of City API project data. Need more? Try our full data

Analysis of ‘Socio-Economic Country Profiles’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/nishanthsalian/socioeconomic-country-profiles on 28 January 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

Context

There can be multiple motivations for analyzing country specific data, ranging from identifying successful approaches in healthcare policy to identifying business investment opportunities, and many more. Often, all these various goals would have to analyze a substantially overlapping set of parameters. Thus, it would be very good to have a broad set of country specific indicators at one place.

This data-set is an effort in that direction. Of-course there are still plenty more parameters out there. If anyone is interested to integrate more parameters to this dataset, you are more than welcome.

Content

This dataset contains about 95 statistical indicators of the 66 countries. It covers a broad spectrum of areas including

General Information Broader Economic Indicators Social Indicators Environmental & Infrastructure Indicators Military Spending Healthcare Indicators Trade Related Indicators e.t.c.

This data-set for the year 2017 is an amalgamation of data from SRK's Country Statistics - UNData, Numbeo and World Bank.

The entire data-set is contained in one file described below:

soci_econ_country_profiles.csv - The first column contains the country names followed by 95 columns containing the various indicator variables.

Acknowledgements

This is a data-set built on top of SRK's Country Statistics - UNData which was primarily sourced from UNData.

Additional data such as "Cost of living index", "Property price index", "Quality of life index" have been extracted from Numbeo and a number of metrics related to "trade", "healthcare", "military spending", "taxes" etc are extracted from World Bank data source. Given that this is an amalgamation of data from three different sources, only those countries(about 66) which have sufficient data across all the three sources are considered.

Please read the Numbeo terms of use and policieshere Please read the WorldBank terms of use and policies here Please read the UN terms of use and policies here

Photo Credits : Louis Maniquet on Unsplash

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

A list of some key resources for comparing London with other world cities.

European Union/Eurostat, Urban Audit

Arcadis, Sustainable cities index

AT Kearney, Global Cities Index

McKinsey, Urban world: Mapping the economic power of cities

Knight Frank, Wealth report

OECD, Better Life Index

UNODC, Statistics on drugs, crime and criminal justice at the international level

Economist, Hot Spots

Economist, Global Liveability Ranking and Report August 2014

Mercer, Quality of Living Reports

PWC, Cities of opportunity

BCG, Decoding Global Talent

Forbes, World's most influential cities

Mastercard, Global Destination Cities Index

Numbeo, Database of user contributed data