Romania ranks 32th among 61 countries surveyed in mid-2016, right after Poland and South Africa, but before Mexico and Bosnia-Herzegovina in terms of quality of life, according to numbeo.com website.
The criteria analysed included the purchasing power, the personal safety, the healthcare quality, the cost of living, the value of properties compared to income, the time allocated for travel, the environmental pollution and the climate.
Top ranked countries are Denmark (201.53 points), Switzerland (196.44 points), Australia (196.40 points), New Zealand (196.09 points) and Germany (189.87 points). Russia (86.53 points) and Ukraine (84.07 points) are neighbours at the bottom of this ranking after Egypt (88.35 pts.) and ahead of a group of countries from Southeast Asia including Indonesia (66.39 pts.), Philippines (60.04 pts.), Malaysia (57.40 pts.), Thailand (49.48 pts.) and Vietnam (31.48 pts.).
It is worth highlighting in this evaluation of life quality several proximities difficult to predict, such as the position of Portugal (11th) ahead of Sweden (12th), despite the first country’s purchasing power just slightly higher than half of the other’s (scoring of 68.38, compared to 117.26), but having the advantage of a better safety, level of pollution and climate.
Also, the Czech Republic (ranked 20th) outruns South Korea (21th) by compensating on other criteria for a slightly reduced development level and Greece (27th) being caught up by Slovakia (28th place) for about the same purchasing power but another structure of comparative advantages (personal safety and healthcare system versus climate).
In the group of countries close to our scoring, Romania (like Poland) offset the lower income level than South Africa also by personal safety, despite a less favourable climate. The country was though almost equalled by Mexico with a similar level of income and without much personal safety, due to the better healthcare benefits (to which, of course, climate was added).
To place ourselves in a regional context, we present the scores for several neighbouring countries that joined the EU within short intervals of one another. At the first four criteria, higher values are better, while lower scores at the last four ones have a better contribution to the overall result. We can see that we have the best personal safety but also the most expensive houses in the region compared to the revenue.
Criteria
Quality of life
Purchasing power
Personal safety
Healthcare system
Climate
cost of life
House prices
Transportation
Pollution
Numbeo.com listed our neighbour EU colleagues, Hungary and Bulgaria, just the 37th and 38th in this ranking, with a purchasing power below Romania although they have a better index of property prices to income. Another neighbour, Serbia (40th), is very close to them, with a more efficient healthcare system than theirs and ours.
Incidentally, we have the worst performance at this critical indicator compared to the analysed countries. Only six of the other 60 states rank lower than us at the healthcare scoring and we are worse than Russia or Bulgaria, but also all Asian countries from the bottom of the ranking, except Vietnam.
Beyond improving the overall results, starting from the purchasing power to improving transportation, we therefore should take immediate action to bring our healthcare system from the third world, where we are now, to at least an acceptable level for our EU membership. Basically, in terms of life quality, this is the criterion that hurts us the most.
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Numbeo.com is a site launched in April 2009 and the research and data available are not influenced by any government organization. Mladen Adamovic, Founder / CEO worked as a software engineer with Google (2007-2009), where he developed internal applications. The site that he coordinates was mentioned as source by several prestigious international publications such as Time, Forbes, The Economist, New York Times, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Sydney Morning Herald, China Daily, etc.
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