Richest Countries In The World

 I subscribe to the Visual Capitalist and a couple of weeks ago, their daily email for the day, alerted me to this juicy nugget of data - Mapped: The 25 Richest Countries in the World. How could I resist and not want to see where my little island in sun ranked against the cash laden powers of the world. 

Pretty large visual, well it does cover the whole planet. Singapore ranked 6th. 

My initial thoughts were "These are the places immigrants will go running to". The next second I thought about the people in these countries and what it really meant to be GDP rich. Were they happy? Were they safe? What about the cost of living? So i headed for the the vast cauldron of knowledge that is Internet to piece some numbers together. Gotta love data. 

Alongside GDP, I made columns for Personal Tax, Happiness Rank, Healthcare, Safety ranking and Population Density. I figure these factors make for some degree of contentment for living in a country. 

Voila - this spreadsheet. 

I couldn't find easy-to-comprehend healthcare data. Most websites would list healthcare as universal or free in these countries but I know that's not the case in Singapore. Doctors and clinics are around every corner but a simple visit to the neighbourhood clinic could easily set you back $30-50 of your own money. I'm sure there are rules to medical care in all these countries but it's quite difficult to compile them for a list like this and to make them comparable. 

After this exercise (which took quite a few days because I was distracted and partly unmotivated by the extent this could go on), I thought another simple factor - quality of life. I even considered the Big Mac index, because who wants to pay US$7 for a burger. I knew there was some global index published somewhere and lo and behold, Numbeo. 

Why didn't I get here sooner. There's a Quality of Life Index which takes into account a lot of the important things in life:
- Cost of living and purchasing power
- Affordability of housing
- Pollution including air, water, etc.
- Crime rates
- Health system quality
- Traffic (commute times)

I've put all that info here, with the Quality Of Life score in pale yellow, the other Numbeo supporting numbers in green, the income tax percentages in blue and the happiness rank in pink. Is that too much data?

Singapore is great - safe, clean, the public service works, internet speeds are fast - but somehow we're not a happy people, well not as happy as other GDP rich people. I think it's the lack of space, high property prices and fear of running out of money to retire. All the doubts also perhaps reflect the declining birth rate here, less than the replacement rate. 

From this list, Canada is looking pretty awesome. Not sure why the safety score is that low though. Perhaps I'm biased because I'm English literate. But who can say no to wide open spaces, clean air, all those trees and poutine.