The World's Best Place to Be Born

Australia the world's second-best place to be born: study

Australia will be the second-best country in the world to be born in next year, a study says.

The "lucky country" scored 8.12 out of a possible 10 points, just 0.1 behind Switzerland, The Economist's Intelligence Unit said in their 2013 where-to-be-born index released last week.

Following closely behind were Scandinavian countries Norway, Sweden and Denmark. New Zealand was ranked seventh with a score of 7.95, while Nigeria came in 80th and last with 4.74 points.

The magazine said the list, the first since 1988, was compiled using a combination of surveys - where people said how happy they are - with objective determinants about the quality of life.
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"Being rich helps more than anything else, but it is not all that counts; things like crime, trust in public institutions and the health of family life matter too," the unit's director of country forecasting services, Laza Kekic, said in a statement.

Indicators used include geography, demography, social and cultural characteristics, government policies and the state of the world economy.

The list was dominated by smaller economies, with larger European economics such as Great Britain (27th), France (26th) and Germany (16th) languishing further down the list. The US, which topped the 1998 list, came in 16th.

Australia was ranked 18th on the 1998 index.

Last year, Australia was ranked second behind Norway in the annual United Nations Human Development Index.

It was the second year in a row that Australia was ranked second to Norway on the UN index, which looked at indicators including education, health, per-capita income and life expectancy.