Mapping Well-Being

Earlier this week Google Maps Mania featured the Wellbeing Map Explorer, a map showing how people subjectively rate their well-being in different English regions. The OECD has also been mapping well-being.

The OECD measured regions around the world in eight different areas – income, jobs, health, access to services, environment, education, safety, and civic engagement. A score was given to each region in each area.

The OECD Regional Well-Being map provides a mapped interface to explore the results of the OECD well-being assessments. Using the map you can not only explore the well-being results for 300 regions around the world but you can compare the results of different regions.

If you select a region on the map you can view the region's well-being scores in each of the eight categories and you can also view a list of other regions which have similar well-being scores. For example California has similar well-being scores to the Basque country in Spain and New York state has similar scores to Greater London in the UK.


The OECD has also mapped how people around the world subjectively view their well-being. The OECD's Better Life Index is an attempt to measure the importance people around the world give to different factors essential for their well-being. It is a survey designed to measure the importance people in different countries give to 11 topics about their quality of life and material living conditions. The OECD has also released a map which visualizes the results of the survey by country.

Each country's marker is colored to reflect the highest rated topic by respondents to the survey in that country. The markers are also sized to show the number of responses from each country. You can mouse-over the markers to view the highest rated topic for each country. If you click on a marker you can view more details about the selected country's results, including the number of responses by gender and age and the ratings given to each topic.

The map includes a useful 'stories' feature which, when selected, zooms in on interesting results from the survey shown on the map.