The Development of a Human Well-Being Index for the United States

Abstract

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed a human well-being index (HWBI) that assesses the over-all well-being of its population at the county level. The HWBI contains eight domains representing social, economic and environmental well-being. These domains include 25 indicators comprised of 80 metrics and 22 social, economic and environmental services. The application of the HWBI has been made for the nation as a whole at the county level and two alternative applications have been made to represent key populations within the overall US population—Native Ameri- cans and children. A number of advances have been made to estimate the values of metrics for counties where no data is available and one such estimator—MERLIN—is discussed. Finally, efforts to make the index into an interactive web site are described.