Wilfred's Challenge: in search of well-being in Ecuador

 By ebnt-photo

Might we see thousands of Britons flocking to Latin America in search of the good life?

In 2009, following the publication of the (un)Happy Planet Index 2.0, we perked the interest of a certain Professor Wilfred Beckerman at Oxford University who wrote a letter in a leading national newspaper mocking the HPI for ranking Latin American countries so highly. “Why is it then that millions of people are trying to emigrate from the happy poor countries to the rich countries and there is so little movement in the reverse direction? ... I presume that as soon as they reached their conclusions, the UK-based authors of the report immediately packed their bags.”

In one sense the distinguished Emeritus Fellow missed the point of the report and the HPI.  The Index measures the ecological efficiency of achieving well-being, not just the well-being itself. So while the Dominican Republic ranks some 72 places above the UK, it does not do this because it has higher well-being, but rather because it achieves average levels of well-being which are not far below the UK’s in terms of health and reported life satisfaction despite its citizens consuming less than a third the natural resources. Indeed the happiest countries in the world are mostly rich Scandinavian ones, such as Denmark.

But this does not deny the fact that there is an enigma here. The mean reported life satisfaction in many Latin Americans is still not far below that in the countries they migrate to, such as the US and Spain. Even in terms of more objective data, such as life expectancy, one can see large migration from Latin American countries whose life expectancy is not much lower than that in the US. Why do they go then?

The push and pull factors of migration are of course complex, and cannot be predicted by simply looking at rankings of GDP, HPI or any other indicator. For one thing, media and cultural myths are enough to make many inhabitants of poorer countries believe that out there, there are cities where the streets are made of gold. But, the puzzle of the high life satisfaction of Latin countries does need to be better understood.

So, a year and a half after Wilfred’s letter, I’ve taken up his challenge and come to Ecuador, where my wife and I will be living for nine months. Ecuador is not the country with the highest HPI nor the highest reported life satisfaction (in both cases that’s Costa Rica, where another member of the well-being team went in November 2010). But it does do better than you’d expect given its GDP – at £4,341 per capita PPP in 2005, mean income is below that of Sri Lanka and a quarter the amount of many Central European countries. And yet the mean life satisfaction of 6.4 and life expectancy of 74.7 years (in 2005) are both above those of countries such as Slovakia and Hungary. Indeed the mean life expectancy is higher than it was in many parts of the UK, such as Manchester, only five years earlier. And in terms of the migration enigma, Ecuador is particularly relevant with up to 15% of Ecuadorians living outside their own country.

Over the next few months I’ll be reporting back from Ecuador and trying to unpick this riddle.  Why do they have relatively high well-being, both in terms of life satisfaction and health, despite it being a poor country.  And why do so many people leave despite that? Ecuador was not chosen at random.  In 2009, the new Constitution institutionalised the concept of buen vivir (or good living) as defining development – the Department for Planning here frames its thinking around the concept. INEC, the National Statistics Office has been collecting data on life satisfaction in its Labour Force Survey well before the UK started thinking about it. As such, there is more data available here on well-being than anywhere else in the developing world, with the exception of Bhutan.  I'll attempt to weave this data in with my anecdotal experiences and attempt to confront Wilfred's challenge.