What the Happy Planet Index tells us. And what it doesn’t
The HPI is not an indicator of the happiest country on the planet, or the best place to live. Nor does it indicate the most developed country in the traditional sense, or the most environmentally friendly. Instead, the HPI combines all of these providing a method of comparing countries’ progress towards the goal of providing long-term well-being for all without exceeding the limits of equitable resource consumption.
As is generally the case with composite indicators, it is possible for countries to achieve comparable scores on the HPI for quite different reasons. However, because the HPI consists of three separate components that are conceptually distinct from one another yet combined intuitively, analysing the differences between such countries is both relatively straightforward and extremely informative from a policy perspective.