In NEWSWEEK’s first-ever Best Countries special issue, we set out to answer a question that is at once simple and

incredibly complex—if you were born today, which country would provide you the very best opportunity to live a healthy,

safe, reasonably prosperous, and upwardly mobile life? Many organizations measure various aspects of national

competitiveness. But none attempt to put them all together. For this special survey, then, NEWSWEEK chose five categories

of national well-being—education, health, quality of life, economic competitiveness, and political environment—and compiled

metrics within these categories across 100 nations. A weighted formula yielded an overall list of the world’s top 100

countries (for a look at the exact data points we used and how we weighted them, as well as how each country did across

the various categories, check out newsweek.com).

(Honorable mention: best small country, best high income, best education)   Despite the long winter, Finland is a pretty great place to be--the best actually. It ranked the highest overall  and also comes in as the best small country, the best high-income country, and the best country for education . Its students scored first in science and second in both reading and math in the 2006 (the most recent data available) Program for International Student Assessment, a test of 15-year-olds' education skills by the OECD. Finland's schoolkids enjoy a laid-back and inclusive learning environment where shoes are optional, all teachers have master's degrees, and extra help is the norm: every year about one in three students gets individual time with a tutor.

 

With such a huge range of nations in the world, the question of whether there is a best place to live seems both simple and elusive. With that idea in mind, NEWSWEEK offers this list of best countries. Given that there are so many ways to measure achievement, we chose the five we felt were most important--health, economic dynamism (the openness of a country's economy and the breadth of the size of its corporate sector), education, political environment, and quality of life. And because it's easier to improve quality of life if you're tiny and rich like Finland, for example, the list also accounts for income and size with rankings by subcategories. Like all lists, this one is not perfect, but it offers surprising and fascinating answers and plenty of insight into which country is healthiest, why Scandinavian countries always come out on top, and why the title of best country has more than one winner.