Monday 15 December 2008

The Monday List: Relativity

Countries with the highest quality of living:
[I used the Human Development Index which measures life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita - without ignoring that it's important to also look at the Gender-related Development Index to get a complete picture]
  1. Iceland
  2. Norway
  3. Australia
  4. Canada
  5. Ireland
  6. Sweden
  7. Switzerland
  8. Japan
  9. Netherlands
  10. France
Top-creditor-nations / Top-Debtor Nations

[This information is really hard to come by: according to articles it looks something like this:]

Japan
China
Saudi Arabia
Russia

/
  1. USA
  2. UK
  3. Germany
  4. France
  5. Netherlands
  6. Ireland
  7. Japan
  8. Switzerland
  9. Belgium
  10. Spain

2 comments:

? said...

I don't know why, I always hesitate to believe even though the metrics seem from a reliable source.

flame gun for the cute ones said...

There is no real list of creditor nations, just a couple of articles stating that Japan is still on top (despite also being pretty high up on the top-debtor nations list that actually exists) and pointing out the importance of China and Russia. This is an old idea which is certainly more complex than three lists: that we kind of live off borrowed wealth. I sometimes wonder how advanced in democratic, scientific and humanistic terms Europe and the US would be without foreign credits.