The headline on a recent study published by uSwitch.com was: “UK enjoys highest net income in Europe, but quality of life is poorest.” The research compared 10 countries by a range of measures and ranked them: France, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy, Sweden, Ireland and finally the UK.

Britain, according to this study, is the worst place to live in Europe. What nonsense. This is one of the most misleading measures I have seen. The index takes 17 measures, including the price of cigarettes, the price of diesel, the amount spent on health and education, retirement age and average hours worked, and weights them all equally. Differences in the price of cigarettes are weighted the same as income per head or life expectancy. The results are incredibly sensitive to which measures you select and what weights you use. Vary either a little and the rankings change markedly.

That set me thinking about some alternatives. Using these, I found the UK does a lot better than France and Spain but not Denmark. Nearly one in five of the Spanish workforce is unemployed, compared with fewer than one in 12 in the UK. Unemployment rates are also higher in France.

In the 2009 Eurobarometer survey, conducted by the European Union this year, respondents were asked about life satisfaction. People’s reports of their happiness are validated by friends and family and correlated with objective measures, including tests of brain activity. It seems that we Brits are happier than the French and the Spanish but not the Danes.

Happiness turns out to be higher among women, married people, the highly educated, the religious, those politically on the right wing, the healthy, the non-obese, those with high income, non-smokers, the self-employed, the sexually active, those with one sexual partner and those without children. Happiness is U-shaped in age, with people feeling at their happiest when young or old.

Happiness data gives a reliable indicator of the quality of life. Think of it as a measure of gross domestic happiness. It reflects movements in unemployment, inflation, output, income and much more. So don’t believe all you read suggesting that quality of life in the UK is rotten. We are happier than the French and the Spanish, so there!

This piece was published in the latest issue of the New Statesman, for which David Blanchflower writes a weekly column on economics. Full article available at http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2009/11/france-spain-happiness-life

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