The UK has placed second in the Social Progress Index, a new measure of countries’ health and wellness.

The Social Progress Index 2013 is an initiative from The Social Progress Imperative and Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter.

It examines how 50 countries – a worldwide representative that comprises 75 per cent of the globe’s population – perform on social and environmental indicators related to basic human needs, with the UK coming out below only Sweden in the results.

The Imperative defines social progress as "the capacity of a society to meet the basic human needs of its citizens, establish the building blocks that allow citizens and communities to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives, and create the conditions for all individuals to reach their full potential".

As such it measures for its Index components include shelter, ecosystem sustainability, health and wellness, personal safety, equity and inclusion, sanitation, and personal freedom.

As well as coming second overall, the UK was also the runner-up for foundations of wellbeing, which comprises access to information and communications; health and wellness; access to basic knowledge; and ecosystem sustainability.

It came sixth out of 50 for the provision of basic human needs (nutrition and basic medical care; shelter; personal safety; and air, water and sanitation), and ranked fifth for its level of opportunity (personal rights; equity and inclusion; access to higher education; and personal freedom and choice).

‘A benchmark to stimulate progress’

“The primary goal of the Social Progress Index is to provide a comprehensive and rigorous tool to benchmark countries and stimulate progress,” the report’s authors write, pointing out that this year's report is a ‘beta’ version that will be extended and improved over time.

“Systematic measurement of social progress [is] important to understand the full causes of economic advancement. Without sophisticated ways of measuring social progress, however, we have lacked the framework and data to understand this relationship empirically.

“The Social Progress Index is an attempt to address these gaps and those opportunities. It provides a holistic, objective, outcome-based measure of a country’s wellbeing that is independent of economic indicators.”

The top twenty

The top twenty ranking countries for social progress are:

• Sweden
• United Kingdom
• Switzerland
• Canada
• Germany
• United States of America
• Australia
• Japan
• France
• Spain
• Republic of Korea
• Costa Rica
• Poland
• Chile
• Argentina
• Israel
• Bulgaria
• Brazil
• United Arab Emirates
• Turkey

The Index was released at the Skoll World Forum, an international conference for social entrepreneurs held last week at the University of Oxford.

Data for the Index was taken from international sources including the World Bank and the World Health Organization. It was developed together with economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States alongside worldwide organisations for social entrepreneurship, philanthropy, academia and business. 

The Social Progress Imperative is funded by organisations including Cisco, Compartamos Banco, Deloitte, Fundación Avina, and Skoll Foundation.

 

You can read the full report on the Social Progress Imperative’s website here.