The Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) is an attempt to measure the quality of life or well-being of a country. The value is the average of three statistics: basic literacy rate, infant mortality, and life expectancy at age one, all equally weighted on a 0 to 100 scale.
It was developed for the Overseas Development Council in the mid-1970s by Morris David Morris, as one of a number of measures created due to dissatisfaction with the use of GNP as an indicator of development. PQLI might be regarded as an improvement but shares the general problems of measuring quality of life in a quantitative way. It has also been criticized because there is considerable overlap between infant mortality and life expectancy.
The UN Human Development Index is a more widely used means of measuring well-being.
Steps to Calculate Physical Quality of Life:
1) Find percentage of the population that is literate (literacy rate).
2) Find the infant mortality rate. (out of 1000 births) INDEXED Infant Mortality Rate = (166 - infant mortality) × 0.625
3) Find the Life Expectancy. INDEXED Life Expectancy = (Life expectancy - 42) × 2.7
4) Physical Quality of Life =
(Literacy Rate + INDEXED Infant Mortality Rate + INDEXED Life Expectancy) _________________________________________________________________________ 3Famous quotes containing the words physical, quality, life and/or index:
“Public Opinion ... an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)
“Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.”
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)