STANDARD OF LIVING OVERVIEW
We have often heard or read about the increasing standards of living among the economically stable groups of the society. But even developed countries do face the problem of disparities in standard of living across the wide range of socio-economic groups. While the richer section of the society continue to lead extravagant lifestyles, the economically weaker class struggles for basic goods and services. To develop a system providing equitable distribution of income and resources, we need to understand the meaning of some basic terms and acknowledge few measurement parameters with the help of which we can define decent standard of living.
Standard of living is the level of income, comforts and services available, generally applied to a society or location, rather than to an individual .Standard of living is narrowly focused on the value of goods and services produced and consumed. It includes measurement factors such as level of income, poverty rate, GDP, GNI etc. Many factors influence it, and those which seem favorable or unfavorable to one person might have the opposite effect on another. Standards of living are relative; they admit of no absolute measure, and comparisons between those of one society or community and those of another are always difficult and sometimes impossible.
In economics, the standard of living is usually used to determine the relative prosperity of the population of an entire country and is often compared to the standard of living that populations of other countries enjoy. It is also used to compare and contrast economic growth of the same geographical area over different timeline. Standard of living is generally concerned with objective metrics outside an individual’s personal control, such as economic, societal, political and environmental matters — such things that an individual might consider when evaluating where to live in the world, or when assessing the success of economic policy.
It is affected by factors such as the quality and availability of employment, class disparity, poverty rate, quality and housing affordability, hours of work required to purchase necessities, gross domestic product, inflation rate, amount of leisure time, access to and quality of healthcare, quality and availability of education, literacy rates, life expectancy, occurrence of diseases, cost of goods and services, infrastructure, access to, quality and affordability of public transportation, national economic growth, economic and political stability, freedom, environmental quality, climate and safety. For the purposes of economics, politics and policy, it is usually compared across time or between groups defined by social, economic or geographical parameters.
While countries like Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Canada are some countries with the top most standards of living, on the other hand Ethiopia, DR Conga, Sudan, Iraq, Yemen are among the countries whose standard of living are extremely low as seen by various indexes; one of them being United Nations Human Development Index.
Yuvakshi Dam
