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The Development of a Human Well-Being Index for the United States
Citation:
Summers, Kevin, L. Smith, L. Harwell, AND K. Buck. The Development of a Human Well-Being Index for the United States. Chapter 6, Quality of Life and Quality of Working Life. InTech, Rijeka, Croatia, , 41, (2017).
Impact/Purpose:
Human well-being is the ultimate integrator of changes in environmental, social (including human health) and economic systems from the perspective of humans. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed a human well-being index (HWBI) that assesses the overall well-being of its population at the county level. The HWBI contains eight domains and represents social, economic and environmental well-being. These domains include 25 indicators comprised of 88 metrics and 25 social, economic and environmental services. The HWBI has been applied for the nation at the county level and two alternative applications have been made to represent key populations within the overall US population; Native Americans and children. Advances have been made to estimate the values of metrics for counties where no data are available and one such estimator; MERLIN; is discussed. It is important to be able to assess the effects of community, state and national policy decisions on the well-being of those governance entities. HWBI can provide a performance metric for the success of these types of decisions from environmental, social and economic perspectives. Finally, efforts to make the index into an interactive web site are described.
Description:
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed a human well-being index (HWBI) that assesses the over-all well-being of its population at the county level. The HWBI contains eight domains and represents social, economic and environmental well-being. These domains include 25 indicators comprised of 88 metrics and 25 social, economic and environmental services. The HWBI has been applied for the nation as a whole at the county level and two alternative applications have been made to represent key populations within the overall US population – Native Americans and children. A number of advances have been made to estimate the values of metrics for counties where no data are available and one such estimator – MERLIN – is discussed. Finally, efforts of make the index into an interactive web site are described.
