Quality of Life Indexes for national policy: Review and agenda for research

A number of governments and public policy institutes have developed "Qualit y of Life Indexes'' - statistics that attempt to measure the quality of lif e for entire states or regions. We develop 14 criteria for determining the validity and usefulness of such QOL indexes to public policy. We then revie w 22 of the most-used QOL indexes from around the world. We conclude that m any of the indexes are successful in that they are reliable, have establish ed time series measures, and can be disaggregated to study subpopulations. However, many fall short in four areas: (1) indexes vary greatly in their c overage and definitions of domains of QOL, (2) none of the indexes distingu ish among the concepts of input, throughput, and output that are used by pu blic policy analysts, (3) they fail to show how QOL outputs are sensitive t o public policy inputs, and (4) none have examined convergent validity agai nst each other. We conclude that many of these indexes are potentially very useful for public policy and recommend research to further improve them.