All Countries

How BGI Works

01

Framework

In 2008, the President of France commissioned Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi — two Nobel laureates and a leading economist — to answer a simple question: if GDP doesn’t measure wellbeing, what should? Their report identified 8 dimensions of life that matter. It did not, however, build an index. BGI is one implementation of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi framework. The 8 dimensions come directly from the Commission’s work. What BGI adds is the indicator selection (27 indicators mapped to pillars), the scoring methodology (weighted geometric mean with floor thresholds), confidence intervals, and interactive weight adjustment so users can see how different value judgments shift the rankings.

02

The 8 Dimensions

1
Material Living Standards
Income, consumption, and wealth — the traditional economic measures that GDP approximates, but measured at the household level rather than national aggregate.
2
Health
Life expectancy, healthy life years, morbidity rates, and access to healthcare. A country can be wealthy and still fail its people here.
3
Education
Educational attainment, quality of schooling, adult literacy, and access to lifelong learning opportunities.
4
Personal Activities
Quality of working life, time use, and the ability to engage in leisure, volunteering, and personal development outside of work.
5
Political Voice & Governance
Democratic participation, civil liberties, rule of law, and the degree to which citizens can influence decisions that affect their lives.
6
Social Connections
Social networks, community trust, support systems, and the quality of interpersonal relationships — factors strongly correlated with wellbeing.
7
Environment
Air and water quality, exposure to environmental hazards, biodiversity health, and carbon emissions per capita.
8
Security
Personal safety, exposure to crime, economic security, and freedom from physical and financial insecurity.
03

Scoring

BGI uses a weighted geometric mean to combine pillar scores. Unlike an arithmetic mean, a geometric mean penalizes imbalance — a country can’t compensate for terrible environmental performance with high GDP. Near-zero in any dimension drags the entire score down.

BGI = exp( sum( w_i * ln(score_i) ) ) for i = 1..8, where sum(w_i) = 1
04

Floor Thresholds

Some failures are non-negotiable. A pillar score below 25 triggers a Critical flag. Below 40, a Warning. These flags appear regardless of the overall BGI score — you can’t average away a crisis.

Critical< 25
Warning< 40
OK>= 40
05

Confidence Intervals

Every BGI ranking includes Monte Carlo confidence intervals. We simulate 10,000 weight configurations around the default, producing a distribution of possible scores. This tells you whether a country’s rank is robust or fragile.

06

Open Source

The entire BGI scoring engine is open source. Every score can be reproduced from raw data using public code. We believe transparency is the only foundation for trust in composite indices.

github.com/jasonpreu-design/bgi

BGI is an independent research project and not affiliated with the OECD, World Bank, or any government body. Methodology subject to revision as data sources improve.