HPI by Income Group (2023)

Oxfam’s excellent work on climate equality has made it clear that the rich are disproportionately responsible for the CO₂ emissions which are destroying our planet. But what do they get from this in terms of health and wellbeing? Do their resource-intensive lifestyles lead to concomitantly higher wellbeing?

For the 2024 edition, we calculated HPI scores for income groups within countries. The results revealed a critical inefficiency: the extravagant consumption of the top 10% of earners in most countries leads to negligible benefits in terms of wellbeing. As a result, the HPI scores of the top income deciles in most of the 15 countries which we analysed were considerably lower than the scores for all the other deciles. This shows how wasteful and counterproductive overconsumption is.

Click on the links below to see how HPI varied between income deciles within those countries in 2023.