Quality of Life in Latin America: a Proposal for a Synthetic Indicator

This chapter provides an approach to measuring quality of life in Latin America from a territorial perspective by creating a Synthetic Quality of Life Indicator (SQLI) and adopting the social indicator approach. Amongst other objectives, the chapter seeks to obtain a robust synthetic measure of quality-of-life levels using the P2 distance method in addition to analysing inter-country disparities. The indicators employed have mainly been chosen depending on the availability of data for the group of countries and so as to ensure comparability at an international scale. The index comprises information on different social indicators from various life domains and enables a classification of Latin American countries, as well as a study of the impact of each individual indicator in order to determine disparities in quality-of-life levels. As a result, it is possible to draw conclusions concerning which aspects emerge as the most relevant when explaining spatial disparities in quality of life in Latin American countries.