On measuring the quality of life

Abstract

It is widely recognized that per capita income is not an adequate indicator of aggregate well-being. It has thus become customary to use a range of socioeconomic indices for assessing the quality of life in a society. In this article we extend measures of general well-being in current use by including ordinal indices of political and civil liberties, and we provide a ranking of the world's poorest countries on the basis of the Borda Rule. We then compare improvements in socioeconomic performance with the availability of political and civil liberties during the decade of the 1970s and observe that improvements in per capita national income, life expectancy at birth, and infant mortality are positively correlated with the extent of political and civil liberties enjoyed by citizens, while improvements in literacy are negatively correlated with these liberties.