Is it true that being ‘small, well-off and Scandinavian’ is best? American news magazine Newsweek recently ranked Finland number one out of one hundred countries. Sweden was third, Norway 6th and Denmark 10th.
In Newsweek’s first-ever Best Countries special issue, the magazine set out to answer a question that is at once simple and incredibly complex—if you were born today, which country would provide you the very best opportunity to live a healthy, safe, reasonably prosperous, and upwardly mobile life?
Many organizations measure various aspects of national competitiveness. But none attempt to put them all together. For this special survey, then, Newsweek chose five categories of national wellbeing: education, health, quality of life, economic competitiveness, and political environment; and compiled metrics within these categories across 100 nations. A weighted formula yielded an overall list of the world’s top 100 countries.
The effort took several months, during which the magazine received aid from an advisory board that included Nobel laureate and Columbia University professor Joseph E. Stiglitz; McKinsey & Co. Social Sector Office director Byron Auguste; McKinsey Global Institute director James Manyika; Jody Heymann, the founding director of McGill University’s Institute for Health and Social Policy and a professor at the university; and Geng Xiao, director of Columbia’s Global Center for East Asia.
The survey was well received, especially by Finns themselves. But given the famous Finnish modesty, sense of inferiority and honesty, some representatives of the Finnish press questioned the correctness of the result.
After having thoroughly recalculated the points they pointed out to Newsweek that Switzerland should have been number one. But Newsweek insisted. The Finnish education system is so outstanding that it gave us some extra points. So Switzerland still has second place. They did better on the health issue, but as far as gender equality is concerned, Finland is way ahead, having introduced female suffrage in 1906 when Swiss women got the right to vote in 1971!
The Finns cannot believe being number one in the world. The reader’s columns in local media are full of comments like: “How can we be number one? We are dull, depressed and shy, and have no ability to do small talk. We drink too much and our climate is horrible, our food sucks etc. But our kids are smart, our economy OK, and neither our President nor our Prime Minister (both female) figure in the headlines of the yellow press. In Finland corruption issues are about peanuts like small contributions to election campaigns. It seems that self-criticism is a good thing considering the results of the survey.
Spain, who ranked 21st on the list overall, did much better than Finland on the health issue, ranking among the top ten. In economic competitiveness, however, Spain was among the bottom nations. A comparison of the time needed for setting up a new enterprise showed that in Spain it takes on average 47 days, In Poland 32, South Korea 14, and in Canada five days. That’s that about Spanish bureaucracy.
But as far as quality of life is concerned, I’ll put Spain among the top countries!