engleski

South Eastern Europe: Discussing Quality of Life Indicators

While considering South Eastern European countries on their way to Europe the paper deals with the question of the quality of life level in the region compared to the Europe (-an Union) and tries to point out at the main weak areas and discrepancies. The concept of the quality of life is nowadays widely considered as a new tool for assessing overall national well-being as well as national trends. Its complexity and, of course, great regional varieties make very difficult defining it. The most widely used traditional denominators of human progress and development are Gross National Product (GNP) and its narrower form Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and some other money-denominated indexes on inflation, incomes, interest rates, trade deficits and the national budget. But in order to assess the whole complexity of the quality of life one should go far behind the merely economic statistics to new areas of concern such as: environmental factors, health, education, human rights. In order to embrace all those areas of concern the UN Human Development Index (HDI) was created and became the most influential and quoted new formula weighting per capita income (PPP), education, life expectancy, environmental factors, poverty gaps, gender and human rights data. Still, one might find aggregating all these areas into one index inappropriate and often confusing. Diverse areas of quality of life deserve their own metrics. The most recent approach, adopted in our research, is a system approach where a number of dimensions of quality of life are viewed as integral to defining a broad picture of national well-being. Those determinants usually include10-12 fields: education, health, housing, recreation, environment, political and social environment, socio-cultural environment, employment, energy and infrastructure.

South Eastern Europe; quality of life; indicators; education; health; housing; environment; employment; socio-cultural environment

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