After our story about Stockholm being the 'best' region for well-being in Sweden, we've taken a closer look at the OECD's new report, which divided Sweden into eight regions and compared them with regions in 34 of the world's richest countries.
The study from the OECD ranked the areas on nine factors: income, jobs, health, access to services, environment, education, safety, civic engagement and housing.
Sweden's regions are incredibly diverse and each has its positives and negatives. Stockholm, for example, scored well in civic engagement, but poorly in housing.
Skåne, meanwhile, was top of the country in access to services such as internet, but got low scores in well-being in general.
In the study, a handful of Swedish regions scored perfect scores including Stockholm and South Sweden for accessibility to services, and East and North Middle Sweden for their safety.
By far the lowest score in any Swedish region was Stockholm's housing – which only ranked 3.7 out of ten.
In fact, housing was a category in which Sweden performed poorly overall. The highest score was only 5.8, which came from Småland and its islands.
Sweden's worst category was income, in which all regions besides Stockholm (at 5.6) scored below 5 out of ten.
All data were pulled from the respective countries' national statistics boards.
In the full report (here), the OECD compared 362 regions, explaining that "comparable measures of regional well-being offer a new way to gauge what policies work and can empower a community to act to achieve higher well-being for its citizens".
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