There are successful countries, less successful and miserable. Those who experience hardships, economically speaking, due to lack of jobs, high prices for products and services, and little or no access to financing.
The ‘Misery Index’ ranks countries by various economic indicators and, using a formula, establishes its score of unhappiness or hardship through which 157 nations go through worldwide.
What is the Misery Index?
The idea of the misery index originated with Arthur Okun, a distinguished economist who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the administration of President Johnson. He developed the original misery index for the United States.
It was later modified by Harvard professor Robert Barro and updated by economist Steven H. Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University.
How is the ‘misery’ of a country calculated?
It should be noted that, in the English language, misery It is a great suffering of the mind or the body, and it can be caused by various factors. On the contrary, in Spanish we usually use the word misery as a synonym for extreme poverty.
The Hanke Misery Index measures how much suffering the inhabitants of a country experience due to three factors: unemployment, inflation and lack of credit.
Hanke’s formula is: the sum of year-end unemployment (multiplied by two), inflation, and bank lending rates, minus the annual percentage change in real GDP per capita.
The higher the result, the more ‘miserable’ is the situation in the country; the lower, the level of hardship is lower.
The 10 most miserable countries in the world
The ten nations with the highest misery index come from four continents and, apparently, they do not have a connection, but there are several situations that they have in common: they are totalitarian regimes, they suffer invasions or a civil war, there is political instability and they suffer from inflation uncontrolled.
These are the countries with the most misery in the world, their index and what is the factor that contributes the most to their poverty:
Place (from worst to best) | Country | misery index | Factor that contributes the most |
1 | Zimbabwe | 414.7 | Inflation |
2 | Venezuela | 330.8 | Inflation |
3 | Syria | 225.4 | Unemployment |
4 | Lebanon | 190,337 | Inflation |
5 | Sudan | 176.1 | Inflation |
6 | Argentina | 156,192 | Inflation |
7 | Yemen | 116.2 | Inflation |
8 | Ukraine | 110,003 | Unemployment |
9 | Cuba | 102 | Inflation |
10 | Türkiye | 101,601 | Inflation |
As can be seen, the most ‘miserable’ countries are engaged in civil wars, such as Syria and Sudan; They are communist regimes, like Cuba and Venezuela, they suffer an invasion, like the case of the Ukraine, or they suffer from galloping inflation, as is the case of Argentina.
What is the least miserable country?
The nation that is furthest from misery, according to the index, is Swiss. He has a score of only 8.57 and is in 157th place, the factor that most ‘contributes’ to his misery is unemployment. Steven Hanke says that one of the things that Switzerland has done very well to maintain the well-being of its population is the reduction of public debt in relation to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
“The debt brake has worked like a charm. Unlike most countries, Switzerland’s debt-to-GDP ratio has been on a downward trend over the past two decades, ever since it enshrined its debt brake into its constitution in a 2002 national referendum. , the central government debt was 29.7% of GDP and by 2018 it had been reduced to 18.7%”, he indicated in an article presenting his index.
And where is Mexico?
Fortunately, the country is far from the top of this ominous list. Mexico is in 114th place out of 157, with a score of 20.3, very low compared to the indices of the top ten places.
The biggest factor in Mexico’s economic hardship, according to the index, is high bank interest rates, which de facto restricts credit for millions of people.
The list, like any other, can be highly debatable, although it is a different way of measuring the economic difficulties that nations are going through. And to you, what do you think of this way of dimensioning misery?
As a final fact: the Latin American country with the lowest score in the 2022 misery index was Ecuador, with 17.5 points, and the factor that contributed the most was high interest rates.
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