| Abstract: | Every economy is facing different social, economic, and environmental problems. These vary from country to country and have different levels of complexity. This is reflected in the difficulty of achieving the various global goals that are set for the long term and are nowadays increasingly focused on the sustainability aspect, seen as the most appropriate path for global development. Less developed countries have greater difficulties in achieving these goals than developed countries. Both groups, of course, are faced with challenges when these are in the phase of realization, which is certainly easier to solve by more developed countries. Here, however, the question arises as to which countries are less or more developed than others. To define economic development, various organizations use mostly similar indicators in the field of living standards, health, and education. Such as gross domestic product, life expectancy, and mean years of education. Based on these indicators, individual institutions have developed indices that can easily measure economic development. The basic one was developed by the United Nations and is called the Human Development Index. Within this and other organizations, the index has been updated and upgraded by, for example, adapting inequalities, inclusive components, and environmental impact. Improved forms of the latter are Inequality-adjusted human development index, Inclusive development index, Happy planet index, and Better life index. In the master's thesis, we focus on the presentation of important indicators of economic and sustainable development and quality of life. In this context, we also explain the calculation of the listed indices, where in addition to these we also deal with the interpretation of the sustainable development index, which is a relatively newer version and measures economic development with an emphasis on sustainability. The World Bank, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund have developed country classifications to classify countries by development, which makes the organization of countries into groups simpler and easier to analyse. Inspired by the studied topic, we formed our development index, which we started with an analysis of 28 countries of the European Union according to individual selected indicators. At first glance, the development index looks like the index of sustainable development, to which we have added an extremely important component for us, the subjective measure of overall life satisfaction. Austria, Sweden, Finland, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Ireland had the best results according to individual indicators. Conversely, the worst results were in Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Italy, and Romania. Later, according to the geometric mean obtained from indices, Sweden, Denmark and Finland fell into the group with high economic development, and Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Germany, Malta, Greece, and Hungary into the group with low economic development. All other EU-28 countries are medium developed. |
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