The United Nations lists Norway, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark and Netherlands as the top five counties to live. Not America, but Scandinavia’s reputation is still going strong.
Norway maintains the top spot of the Human Development Index rankings in a report released by the UN. The index was designed in 1990 to give a fuller picture of livability by combining income data with health and education statistics instead of ranking countries on economic achievement alone.
As noted, Australia and Switzerland took second and third place. The U.S. ranked number eight. The bottom five countries in rank order of HDI are: Niger, Central African Republic, Eritrea, Chad and Burundi. There is twice as wide a range in HDI values among the bottom five countries compared to the top five, which indicates that countries with the highest HDIs have similar human development while countries at the bottom vary much
more.
The Human Development Report is an editorially independent publication of the United Nations Development Program. For free downloads of the 2015 Human Development Report, plus additional reference materials on its indices and specific regional implications, please visit: http://hdr.undp.org