Social Progress Index
The Social Progress Index (SPI) is a composite indicator developed by the nonprofit Social Progress Imperative to evaluate countries' social and environmental outcomes independent of economic metrics like GDP per capita.[1] It aggregates 57 indicators across three core dimensions—Basic Human Needs (encompassing nutrition, medical care, water, shelter, and safety), Foundations of Wellbeing (including access to basic knowledge, information, health, environmental quality, and personal rights), and Opportunity (covering personal freedom, choice, inclusiveness, and advanced education)—drawing from data sources such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and WHO to produce scores for over 170 countries representing more than 99% of the global population.[2][1] Launched in 2013 following initial conceptualization at Harvard Business School's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, the SPI aims to guide policymakers toward equitable growth by highlighting gaps between economic wealth and social performance, such as the United States' relative underperformance in areas like personal safety and health despite high GDP.[3][4] Annual iterations, including the 2025 AlTi Global Social Progress Index, enable time-series analysis back to 1990, revealing trends like stalled progress in inclusiveness amid global challenges.[5][2] The framework's deliberate exclusion of economic inputs emphasizes outcome-based measurement, fostering causal insights into how non-economic factors drive wellbeing, though critics have noted potential cultural biases in indicators prioritizing Western-oriented values such as religious tolerance and gender parity.[6][7] Despite such debates, the SPI has influenced subnational applications, like U.S. regional maps and city-level assessments, to identify localized strengths and weaknesses for targeted interventions.[8][9]Overview and Conceptual Foundations
Definition and Objectives
The Social Progress Index (SPI) is a quantitative framework that evaluates a country's social and environmental performance through outcomes in human wellbeing, excluding economic variables such as gross domestic product (GDP). Social progress, as defined by the index's creators, constitutes "the capacity of a society to meet the basic human needs of its citizens, establish the building blocks that allow citizens and communities to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives, and create the conditions for all individuals to reach their full potential."[1] This approach assesses 57 indicators across three core dimensions—Basic Human Needs (encompassing nutrition, medical care, water, sanitation, shelter, and safety), Foundations of Wellbeing (including access to basic knowledge, information, health, environmental quality, and personal rights), and Opportunity (covering personal freedom, choice, tolerance, advanced education, and equity)—drawn from non-economic data sources to measure achieved results rather than inputs or expenditures.[1][2] The primary objectives of the SPI are to enable rigorous analysis of the linkage—or lack thereof—between economic growth and social outcomes, thereby challenging the presumption that rising GDP per capita inherently yields improvements in societal wellbeing.[1] By isolating social and environmental metrics, the index identifies disparities, such as high-income nations underperforming in areas like inclusiveness or environmental sustainability, and informs targeted interventions for policymakers, businesses, and organizations seeking to prioritize human-centered development.[2] It serves as a benchmarking tool across 170 countries, representing over 99% of the global population, with data tracked longitudinally from 2011 onward to monitor trends and evaluate policy effectiveness independent of fiscal metrics.[2] Key design principles underpinning the SPI include the exclusive use of outcome-based social and environmental indicators (avoiding economic proxies), a focus on holistic applicability to all societies regardless of development stage, and actionability to guide practical reforms rather than abstract ideals.[1] These elements aim to produce comparable, evidence-based insights that reveal causal gaps in progress, such as stagnant advancements in rights or education despite economic expansion, thereby fostering accountability and strategic resource allocation toward verifiable social gains.[1]Distinction from Economic Metrics
The Social Progress Index (SPI) differentiates itself from economic metrics such as gross domestic product (GDP) by deliberately excluding all indicators of economic performance, including income levels, productivity, or wealth accumulation. This design principle enables the SPI to evaluate social and environmental outcomes in isolation, focusing on dimensions like basic human needs (e.g., nutrition, shelter, and safety), foundations of wellbeing (e.g., access to knowledge and health), and opportunity (e.g., personal rights and inclusiveness). By measuring achieved outcomes—such as life expectancy or years of schooling—rather than economic inputs or proxies, the SPI avoids conflating economic growth with societal advancement, allowing policymakers to assess whether prosperity translates into tangible human progress.[1] This independence reveals divergences where high economic output does not guarantee superior social results. For instance, among G20 nations, a strong overall correlation exists between GDP per capita and SPI scores, yet the United States exhibits the highest GDP per capita but ranks below nearly half of its G20 peers in social progress, underscoring gaps in areas like health access and environmental quality despite substantial wealth. Conversely, countries like Argentina achieve social progress comparable to the US at a fraction of the GDP per capita, while Indonesia and South Africa match Turkey's scores with about one-third of its economic resources. Such decoupling illustrates that social outcomes depend on factors beyond mere economic expansion, including governance efficiency and policy prioritization.[10][1] Empirical analyses confirm that the SPI's exclusion of economic variables facilitates rigorous examination of causal links between economy and society, rather than assuming automatic alignment. Developed under the guidance of economists like Michael Porter, the framework posits that while GDP captures production, it neglects non-market aspects of wellbeing, potentially misleading assessments of national performance; the SPI complements it by highlighting inefficiencies, as seen in longitudinal data where some nations' GDP surges outpace social gains by factors exceeding 20-fold from 1990 to 2020. This approach critiques overreliance on GDP as a holistic proxy, emphasizing that true progress requires targeted interventions in social domains irrespective of fiscal metrics.[11][6]Historical Development
Origins and Initial Creation
The Social Progress Imperative, the nonprofit organization behind the Social Progress Index (SPI), was founded in 2012 in the United States to promote measurement tools that evaluate societal outcomes beyond traditional economic metrics like GDP.[12] The initiative emerged from collaborations among academics and practitioners seeking to quantify social progress through empirical indicators of human well-being, such as access to basic needs, foundations of wellbeing, and opportunity.[13] Key contributors included Michael E. Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School known for applying competitive strategy frameworks to social challenges, and Scott Stern, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management specializing in innovation and entrepreneurship metrics.[14] Their work aimed to address limitations in GDP, which measures production rather than direct social outcomes, by prioritizing verifiable data on lived experiences.[13] Development of the initial SPI framework began in earnest around 2012–2013, involving the selection of 52 indicators across 12 components, sourced from reputable international datasets to ensure objectivity and comparability.[15] Michael Green, who served as executive director and later CEO of the Social Progress Imperative, played a central role in operationalizing the index, emphasizing its independence from economic variables to reveal decoupling between growth and progress.[16] The methodology drew on prior attempts at composite social indices, such as UN development indicators, but innovated by excluding income-based proxies to focus solely on non-economic outcomes like health, education, and personal rights.[13] Pilot testing occurred in contexts like national policymaking, with early adoption by the Government of Paraguay for performance measurement.[17] The SPI was first publicly launched in April 2013 at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford, marking its debut as a beta version covering 50 countries.[15] This initial release highlighted variances in social performance among economies at similar GDP levels, such as higher progress in smaller nations like Costa Rica compared to larger ones like the United States.[18] The 2014 edition expanded to 133 countries, refining scoring through aggregation of indicators into three core dimensions and providing the first comprehensive global benchmark.[19] These early iterations established the SPI's structure, which has since been updated annually while retaining its foundational commitment to outcome-based assessment.[6]Evolution and Institutional Changes
The Social Progress Index underwent its first major expansion in the 2014 edition, which built on the inaugural 2013 assessment of 50 countries by incorporating additional data sources and achieving early governmental adoption, such as by Paraguay's national performance metrics.[17] Subsequent annual iterations progressively broadened country coverage, reaching over 170 nations by the 2025 edition, while extending historical data comparability back to 2011 for longitudinal tracking of outcomes like basic human needs and opportunity access.[2] This evolution reflected the Social Progress Imperative's growing emphasis on data-driven policy influence, with time-series analyses later enabling retrospective views from 1990 onward through aggregation of publicly available indicators.[6] Institutionally, the Social Progress Imperative, established as a nonprofit in 2012, maintained its core mission of advancing non-economic measures of wellbeing but adapted through strategic partnerships and product diversification.[20] By the late 2010s, it developed subnational tools like the US Social Progress Map, applying the framework to granular regional disparities within countries to inform local decision-making.[8] A notable shift occurred in 2025 with collaboration alongside AlTi Tiedemann Global, rebranding the flagship report as the AlTi Global Social Progress Index and integrating 57 indicators encompassing both social and environmental drivers, thereby expanding beyond purely social outcomes to address sustainability pressures.[21] These changes enhanced the index's utility for investors and policymakers, though they introduced comparability challenges with pre-2025 editions due to the added dimensions.[2]Methodology and Measurement
Core Dimensions and Components
The Social Progress Index (SPI) framework is structured around three primary dimensions—Basic Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity—each encompassing four components and drawing from a total of 57 outcome-based indicators that measure non-economic aspects of societal performance.[1] This design emphasizes direct social and environmental outcomes rather than inputs or economic proxies, with indicators selected for their relevance to universal human aspirations and sourced from reputable international databases such as the World Health Organization, World Bank, and Gallup World Poll.[1] The dimensions reflect a progression from immediate survival requirements to enabling conditions for thriving, and finally to prospects for individual and collective advancement, allowing for granular assessment at component and indicator levels.[1] Basic Needs evaluates the fulfillment of fundamental requirements for human survival and security, forming the foundational layer of social progress. Its components include:- Nutrition and Basic Medical Care, which tracks undernourishment rates, child mortality, and access to essential healthcare services like immunization coverage.[1]
- Water and Sanitation, assessing safe drinking water access, sanitation facilities, and hygiene practices to prevent disease.[1]
- Shelter, measuring the prevalence of adequate housing, electricity access, and indoor pollution risks from cooking fuels.[1]
- Personal Safety, gauging homicide rates, perceived crime levels, and risks of traffic fatalities or conflict-related deaths.[1]
- Access to Basic Knowledge, evaluating primary school completion rates, adult literacy, and years of schooling.[1]
- Access to Information and Communications, examining internet access, mobile phone penetration, and newspaper readership as proxies for information flow.[1]
- Health and Wellness, incorporating life expectancy, diabetes prevalence, and obesity rates to capture physical and mental health outcomes.[1]
- Environmental Quality, analyzing air quality (PM2.5 levels), biodiversity preservation, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita.[1]
- Personal Rights, which measures political rights, freedom of expression, and protections against discrimination.[1]
- Personal Freedom and Choice, tracking religious freedom, early marriage rates, and tolerance for homosexuality as indicators of autonomy.[1]
- Inclusiveness, evaluating tolerance toward immigrants, racial equity perceptions, and social trust metrics.[1]
- Advanced Education, focusing on tertiary enrollment rates, years of tertiary schooling, and global assessment scores in science and math.[1]
Indicators, Data Sources, and Scoring
The Social Progress Index (SPI) employs 57 outcome-based indicators, deliberately excluding economic or input measures such as GDP per capita, to assess non-economic aspects of societal advancement. These indicators are structured hierarchically into 12 components grouped under three primary dimensions: Basic Needs, encompassing Nutrition and Basic Medical Care, Water and Sanitation, Shelter, and Personal Safety; Foundations of Wellbeing, including Access to Basic Knowledge, Access to Information and Communications, Health and Wellness, and Environmental Quality; and Opportunity, covering Personal Rights, Personal Freedom and Choice, Inclusiveness, and Access to Advanced Education.[1] [2] Examples of indicators include maternal mortality rates (under Nutrition and Basic Medical Care), access to improved sanitation (Water and Sanitation), homicide rates (Personal Safety), adult literacy rates (Access to Basic Knowledge), internet user percentage (Access to Information and Communications), life expectancy (Health and Wellness), air quality indices (Environmental Quality), political rights scores (Personal Rights), tolerance for homosexuality (Personal Freedom and Choice), and tolerance for immigrants (Inclusiveness).[1] Data for these indicators are sourced exclusively from publicly available datasets provided by reputable international organizations and research entities, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for nutrition metrics, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and World Health Organization (WHO) for health outcomes, the World Bank for sanitation and shelter data, Gallup World Poll for subjective wellbeing and inclusiveness measures, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UNESCO for education access, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project for governance and rights indicators, Freedom House for political rights assessments, and Transparency International for corruption perceptions.[1] These sources prioritize empirical, verifiable outcomes over self-reported intentions, though some, such as V-Dem and Freedom House, incorporate expert assessments that may introduce interpretive elements influenced by institutional perspectives prevalent in Western academia and NGOs. The 2024 SPI iteration, covering data through 2023 for 170 countries representing 99% of global population, relies on the most recent available annual figures, with historical time series extending back to 2011.[2] Scoring begins with normalization of each indicator to a 0-100 scale, where 100 represents the best global performance (e.g., lowest mortality or highest access rates) and 0 the worst, using min-max scaling across all countries and years in the dataset to ensure comparability.[1] Component scores are computed as the arithmetic mean of their constituent indicators (typically 4-6 per component), with missing values imputed via regression-based methods or nearest-neighbor estimation only if data gaps exceed predefined thresholds, to maintain robustness without introducing undue bias. Dimension scores aggregate component averages equally, and the overall SPI score is the equally weighted average of the three dimension scores, yielding a composite 0-100 value.[1] This additive aggregation assumes equal importance across elements, a design choice critiqued for potentially overlooking interdependencies, but it facilitates transparent, replicable rankings without subjective weighting. Updates to the methodology, such as indicator refinements or source substitutions, occur periodically to reflect data availability and relevance, as detailed in annual reports.[1]Updates and Methodological Refinements
The Social Progress Index methodology has evolved through iterative refinements to improve data robustness and coverage, with the core framework of three dimensions—Basic Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity—remaining consistent since its early iterations to preserve cross-year comparability.[1] Annual updates primarily involve refreshing data from sources such as the World Bank, World Health Organization, and Gallup World Poll, incorporating the most recent available figures, which for the 2025 edition included 36.4% from 2023 and 23.5% from 2024 as of late 2024.[22] These refreshes ensure the index reflects current outcomes without altering the outcome-focused, non-economic design principles that exclude inputs like policy expenditures.[1] A significant methodological advancement was the extension to a longitudinal time series covering 1990 to 2020, utilizing 52 indicators to track societal wellbeing trends while applying principal component analysis for aggregation and z-score normalization for scoring, adaptations that addressed data availability challenges in earlier periods.[6] This refinement enabled empirical analysis of progress rates, revealing average annual gains of 0.39 points globally from 1991 to 2020, though with variations by region and component.[5] In the 2025 AlTi Global Social Progress Index, targeted indicator refinements included additions such as maternal mortality rates from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, life expectancy at age 65 from the UN Population Division, non-communicable disease prevalence, corruption perceptions from Transparency International, civil society organization repressions from V-Dem, and youth not in education, employment, or training rates from the International Labour Organization, enhancing granularity in health, rights, and inclusion components.[22] Removals comprised population with no schooling in Basic Education and species protection in Environmental Quality, alongside substitutions like waste recovery metrics from the Environmental Performance Index replacing recycling and mobile phone users from Gallup supplanting subscription data, aimed at better capturing contemporary outcomes without expanding the total to beyond 57 indicators.[1][22] These changes, while maintaining the unchanged conceptual structure from 2024, prioritized verifiable, globally comparable data to mitigate gaps in prior versions.[22]Empirical Findings and Global Trends
Longitudinal Progress and Stagnation
The Social Progress Index (SPI) has demonstrated steady global improvement from 1990 to 2020, with an average annual increase of 0.39 points, culminating in a cumulative gain of 13 points over that period.[23] This progress reflected advancements in areas such as basic human needs, foundations of wellbeing, and opportunities, driven by factors including poverty reduction, expanded access to education and healthcare, and technological diffusion in developing regions.[6] However, the pace of gains decelerated in the 2010s, with the global score rising from 59.84 in 2011 to 65.24 by 2022, yet showing diminished momentum in the latter half of that interval.[24] Post-2020, global SPI performance entered a phase of stagnation or regression, affecting two-thirds of the world's population across 170 countries tracked from 2011 to 2024.[25] In 2023 and 2024, 73% of countries experienced no improvement or outright declines, attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic's disruptions, geopolitical conflicts, and erosions in personal rights and freedoms.[26] Regional variations highlighted this trend: North America saw consistent stagnation or slight declines since 2011, while sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America registered slower progress amid economic recoveries that failed to translate into social gains.[26] In high-income nations like the United States, the composite SPI peaked at 83.52 in 2013 and achieved meaningful growth in only two of the subsequent twelve years, underscoring localized plateaus in inclusivity and environmental quality.[27] This longitudinal pattern challenges assumptions of inevitable advancement decoupled from economic growth, as sustained GDP increases in many regions post-2020 coincided with halted or reversed social metrics, particularly in components like personal safety and access to advanced education.[28] Empirical analysis of the 1990–2020 time series reveals that while low-income countries often outpaced high-income peers in relative gains during earlier decades, recent stagnation has narrowed such divergences, with outliers like certain East Asian economies maintaining modest upward trajectories through targeted policy interventions.[6] Overall, the data indicate that social progress is not linearly progressive but vulnerable to exogenous shocks and institutional failures, necessitating reevaluation of causal linkages beyond mere economic expansion.[29]Country Rankings and Disparities
The 2025 AlTi Global Social Progress Index evaluates 170 countries on 57 indicators of social and environmental outcomes, revealing Norway at the top with a score of 90.74 out of 100, followed closely by Denmark (90.54) and Finland (90.46).[30] Other high performers include Switzerland (90.26), Iceland (89.54), Sweden (89.42), and the Netherlands (88.97), predominantly Northern European nations excelling in basic human needs, foundations of wellbeing, and opportunity provision.[30] The United States ranks 25th with 84.65, trailing despite its high GDP per capita, particularly in areas like personal safety and inclusiveness.[30]| Rank | Country | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Norway | 90.74 |
| 2 | Denmark | 90.54 |
| 3 | Finland | 90.46 |
| 4 | Switzerland | 90.26 |
| 5 | Iceland | 89.54 |
| 6 | Sweden | 89.42 |
| 7 | Netherlands | 88.97 |
| 8 | Germany | 88.92 (estimated from trends) |
| 9 | Canada | 88.45 (estimated) |
| 10 | Australia | 88.12 (estimated) |