Ireland fifth in quality of life report

IRELAND:Ireland ranks fifth in the world on a prestigious global measure of quality of life but second worst among developed nations for poverty, a United Nations report has found.

The UN Development Programme's Human Development Report 2007 puts Ireland behind Iceland, Norway, Australia and Canada on its development table of 177 countries, and ahead of the US and all its EU neighbours. This represents a fall of one place on last year's report but a rise of one place because the data used in the previous report have since been updated.

The index, which measures a country's development, is based on an aggregate measure of life expectancy, educational attainment and income levels. While life expectancy and educational enrolment have risen gradually in Ireland in the past 20 years, the main contribution to our improved performance on the index has come from the surge in national incomes.

However, Ireland ranks 17th out of 18 OECD states in a separate index in the report which measures human poverty. Some 16 per cent of the Irish population is recorded as living in poverty, a worse figure for any other country apart from Italy.

The main reason for Ireland's bad score on this index is the high level of functional illiteracy here, with more than one in five in the population recorded as being unable to perform simple literacy tasks.

Irish incomes, at an adjusted level of $38,505 (€25,950) per head, are ranked fourth in the world, behind Luxembourg, Iceland and the US.

According to UNDP, Ireland has recorded consistent progress in human development indicators over the past 15 years. Since 1990, life expectancy at birth has increased by more than three years, per capita GDP has more than doubled and educational enrolment has grown by 19 per cent.

Despite its high ranking on the human development index, Ireland performed less well in other areas. Only Iceland and Spain among the top 20 countries on the index had higher inflation than Ireland (an average 2.9 per cent a year) since 1990.

Inequality in Ireland is well above average in the developed world, with the top 10 per cent's share of income being 9.4 times that of the bottom 10 per cent of the population. Ireland spends 5.7 per cent of GDP on education, with Finland and the Netherlands the lowest figure in western Europe. Spending on education, at 4.8 per cent, is also relatively low by European standards.

However, Ireland's GDP figure is inflated by the presence here of so many multinationals, whose profits go offshore.

Imports amount to 68 per cent of GDP, higher than any other western country apart from Luxembourg, the report shows.

It also notes that in Ireland women earn significantly less than men. Measured in purchasing-power parity terms in US dollars, it found that women here earned an estimated average of $21,076 compared to the men's average of $40,000.

On a separate "gender empowerment measure" the document places Ireland in 19th place, pointing out that the number of seats in parliament held by women was only 14.2 per cent of the total.