Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands ranked as the best five countries to live in but Africa’s quality of life plummeted because of AIDS, said a U.N. report released on Thursday. The United States was ranked in eighth place, a drop of one position from 2003 in the report that rates not only per-capita income but also educational levels, health care and life expectancy in measuring a nation’s well-being. The Human Development Index, prepared by the U.N. Development Program, is issued annually and includes every country for which statistics are available. Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Liberia were among nations not included because of lack of data. Norway has led the list for the past four years.
Aside from the overall index, the report produces indicators on women’s equality, income inequality and consumption, poverty and other categories that countries use to measure development. In Canada, for example, the index has been used in advertisements to attract business. The industrialized nations as usual were in the top 20, their ratings close to one another. Belgium was in sixth place, followed by Iceland, the United States, Japan, Ireland, Switzerland, Britain, Finland, Austria, Luxembourg, France, Denmark, New Zealand, Germany and Spain. At the bottom of the list for the seventh year was Sierra Leone, emerging from a decade of civil war. Right above it were Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and Burundi. The world’s newest nation, East Timor, was included for the first time and ranked 158th out of 177 countries. |