The regions of the world are so different from one another, it seems like it would be extremely difficult to narrow down one place as the absolute best place to live. However, we may have found our answer.
Canberra, Australia is apparently the best place in the world to live, according to data from a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report on global well-being. OECD, as the organization is more commonly known, ranked the 362 regions of its 34 member nations based on nine measures of well-being, which included income, jobs, housing, health, education, environment, safety, civic engagement and accessibility of services.
The New York Times' Upshot blog calculated the averages for the regional rankings and found that the Australian capital ranked No.1, along with five other regions of Australia. The top 10 included two regions of Norway and two U.S. states, New Hampshire and Minnesota.
Australia is also the country with the best well-being, according to the OECD report's data. It was followed by Norway, Canada, Sweden and the U.S. The countries at the top of the pack seemed to fare better in some of the well-being measures than others. For example, Americans did better in the income department whereas it's safer to live in Norway. Australia's highest mark was in civic engagement due to its compulsory voting law, but it didn't do as well in the education category, which measures the percentage of workers that graduated high school.
For every list that has a top five, there also has to be a bottom five. The OECD found that Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Mexico are the toughest places to live, and the bottom 10 regions were all Mexican states.
In case your state or country fell somewhere in the middle, you can use OECD's web tool, which launched in June 2014 but whose data has since been expanded. You can pop in your region or check out a foreign land in the data set, and the web tool will tell you how it scored on each measure and give you detailed results to see how it compared to other regions in the same country and around the world.
Unfortunately, with 34 member nations, these OECD results are far from comprehensive. The vast majority of member nations are located in North America, South America and Europe. However, if you do happen to live in one of its member nations, it is kind of fun to see how your way of life stacks up to a neighboring country or even a neighboring state, even if you don't live in the best place on Earth.
