For a good country in general to live a honest life and perhaps to put up a business and raise kids. I scorecarded several countries. Including only
developed countries since they have literacy, basic education, electricity etc. without specifically having to check for these. I also only included
sovereign countries (excludes hong kong for example.)
Scoring principle was in top 20 lists N
gets 20 points N
2 gets 19 points etc...
Stats used were:
UN Human Development Index 2004)
nationmaster.com life expectancy at birth
Transparency inc corruption perceptions index 2004
Growth competitiveness index rankings 2003
aneki.com cleanest countries
nationmaster.com long term unemployment (bottom-20)
Unfortunately I could not find stats for crime or healthcare that would've included at all the top-10 countries (for example the nationmaster crime
index doesn't include sweden but sweden is not crime free). So no such scores are not added to avoid unequal advantages. Many individual indicators
may be used in many different indexes used which may skew results a bit (for example corruption allready has probably some effect to the growth
competitiviness index as does unemployment). Life expectancy acts as a some kind of health index.
Result scores top-20 followed by total taxes percentage for single worker
1. Sweden 90 (48,6%)
2. Norway 88 (37%)
3. Switzerland 83 (29,5%)
4. Iceland 82 (25,7%)
5. Canada 75 (30,2%)
6. Finland 73(45,9%)
7. Australia 72 (23,1%)
8. United States 65 (30,0%)
9. Denmark 63 (44,2%)
10. Netherlands 58 (42,3%)
11. Japan 53 (24,2%)
12. New Zealand 51 (19,6%)
13. UK 42 (29,7%)
14. Austria 42 (44,7%)
15. Singapore 30 (22%)
16. Luxembourg 30 (33,9%n)
17. Germany 24 (50,7%)
18. France 21 (48,3%)
19. Belgium 20 (55,6%)
20. Ireland 19 (25,8%)
But what is wanted is a relation between quality and taxes and here follows the top-10 for score per tax percentage. Congratulations winners
1. Iceland (3,191)
2. Australia (3,117)
3. Switzerland (2,814)
4. New Zealand (2,602)
5. Canada (2,483)
6. Norway (2,378)
7. Japan (2,190)
8. United States (2,167)
9. Sweden (1.852)
10. Finland (1.590)
Sources:
www.infoplease.com...
www.transparency.org...
www.weforum.org...
www.aneki.com...
www.nationmaster.com...
www.nationmaster.com...&int=20
www.nationmaster.com...&int=20
But of course what are the good parameters for someone else are always different. So if you don't like the indicators or indexes I used you can do
your own, www.nationmaster.com is a good source if you wish to start sorting by number of mcdonaldses per capita or by miles of unpawed highways.
www.aneki.com also has many convenient top-20 lists
[edit on 28-10-2004 by vibetic]