We propose a summary statistic for the economic well-being of people in a country. Our
measure incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality, first for a narrow set of
countries using detailed micro data, and then more broadly using multi-country datasets.
While welfare is highly correlated with GDP per capita, deviations are often large. Western
Europe looks considerably closer to the United States, emerging Asia has not caught up as
much, and many developing countries are further behind. Each component we introduce …