A new index to measure the human well-being in Wallonia and its communes (South of Belgium)

In 2012, the Walloon Government ordered the Walloon Institute for Prospective, Evaluation and Statistics (IWEPS) to calculate five indexes in order to guide and evaluate the public actions, together with the GDP. The index for the conditions of human well-being (CWBI) is presently the first step in the elaboration of the wellbeing index. The methodology is the one used by the Council of Europe. Actually, the CWBI is calculated by using 60 basic indicators, gathered into 8 families. After normalisation, the CWBI is the arithmetic mean of the 60 basic indicators, each of them having the same weight. The CWBI was calculated for the 262 communes of Wallonia and varies from 0.428 to 0.674, with a regional mean of 0.572. An opposition between urban and rural communes clearly appears, the last ones having the best scores. Communes along the borders of Germany and Luxemburg have the highest indexes, while communes in the old industrial areas have the lowest scores. Employment, income, family relations and security are the factors which are the most narrowly linked to the CWBI. At the communal level, social and security expenses per capita have a significant and negative correlation coefficient with the CWBI. In the future, in order to elaborate a finer index, new data, up to now not directly available, will be collected at the communal level, about quantitative and qualitative aspects.