What matters the most to people?

Abstract

The OECD Better Life Index is an interactive composite index that aggregates average measures of country’s well-being outcomes through weights defined by users. This paper studies these weights by analysing the responses given by close to 130 000 users since 2011 to date. The paper has three goals. First, to investigate the factors shaping users’ preferences over a set of 11 well-being dimensions. Second, to provide insights into users’ preferences for a large group of countries which differ in terms of culture and living conditions. Third, to test for the effects of users’ satisfaction with respect to a given well-being dimension on the weight they attach to it, across different population groups. Various empirical models are used to identify responses’ patterns and see whether they can be accounted for by respondents’ characteristics and their perceived well-being. The paper finds that health status, education and life satisfaction are the aspects that matter the most for BLI users in OECD countries. Men assign more importance to income than women, while women value community and work-life balance more than men. Health, safety, housing and civic engagement become more important with age, while life satisfaction, work-life balance, jobs, income and community are particularly important for youth. There are also clear regional patterns in the choices by BLI users; for instance education, jobs and civic engagement are particularly important in South America while personal safety and work-life balance matter a lot in Asia-Pacific. Analysis carried out on a subset of observations (i.e. BLI-users who completed an extended questionnaire) finds that, for several well-being dimensions (i.e. jobs, housing, community, health, education, civic engagement, personal safety, life satisfaction and work-life balance), there is a positive and linear relationship between individual preferences and self-reported satisfaction in the same dimension, with evidence of distinctly different patterns of association within the population in the case of income and education.