Quality of life: interface between cultural specificities and social progress

Abstract

Quality of life is considered one of the factors that indicates country’s wellbeing. Because of that, the quality of life is the scope scientist from different countries are concentrated on. Hence, different studies suggest different indexes to assess the quality of life. One of the newest indexes is the social progress index that provides comprehensive, objective and transparent measure of a country’s quality of life that is independent of economic indicators. The importance of this index is that one can identify particular strengths and eaknesses of the countries. The authors of the paper focus their attention on analysing similarities of the countries within the social progress index. Therefore, aim of the research is to divide countries into the groups according to similarities in non-economic parameters of country’s welfare. Going forward, those groups are analysed with the view of finding connection between quality of life and specificities of national culture. As the result, methodology for dividing countries into groups is suggested and relation between national culture and quality of life is presented. The current study contributes to scientific literature on social progress index relationship with Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.