Israeli Quality of Life Lags Behind OECD

Israel’s quality of life is below average among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a senior economist on the organization’s Israel desk said Wednesday. The OECD is the global grouping of the world’s developed economies.

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In the majority of categories measured, including housing, the level of education, environmental quality and social inequalities, Israel’s performance falls below average, economist Claude Giorno told the annual meeting of the Joint Distribution Committee-Ashalim, a JDC program that works with children at risk and their families.

Giorno’s data related to how Israel fared relative to other of the organization’s member countries. Although the data he presented was from 2013, Israel’s relative standing has not improved since, Giorno said.

His group’s measure of quality of life was developed in the belief that measuring a country’s performance only through its gross domestic product does not accurately measure the situation of its citizenry.

Israel, he said, functions relatively well by only three OECD measures — health, social connections and sense of happiness. The country has a medical system that performs relatively well and social connections are apparently a product of ties developed during army service.