Local circumstances affect individual well-being, the cohesiveness of societies and opportunities for a better future. With the How’s Life in Your Region project, a part of the Better Life Initiative, the OECD launched in 2014 an innovative approach to measuring the quality of life at regional and local levels and understanding what needs to be done to achieve greater progress for all.

Over the last 15 years, Mexico has improved its performance in many of the dimensions that are essential to a good life, notably in health outcomes, access to basic services and quality of housing. Further efforts are now required to improve performance in other areas, such as education, safety, poverty reduction and quality of jobs, where Mexico still fares poorly in international comparisons. In addition, stark differences in outcomes exist across its states. To offer one example of the work that lies ahead on both fronts: only about 44% of Mexico’s labour force has at least secondary education, 30 percentage points below the OECD average, while the education gap between the Federal District (58%) and the state of Chiapas (27%) is the second largest disparity within any OECD country except for Turkey.

This chapter presents the OECD framework to measure the drivers of well-being and assess disparities within a country. It details how this framework has been adapted in Mexico to develop a system of well-being indicators for the 31 Mexican states and the Federal District. The chapter also discusses the ways this statistical evidence can inform and shape policy in Mexico.

This chapter provides an assessment of well-being in Mexican states through evidence in 12 dimensions covering both material conditions and quality of life. The analysis examines the extent of disparities between states and, when possible, of inequality within states. Progress on well-being is tracked through the changes observed in the past 10-15 years in Mexico and in each state for each of the 35 statistical indicators used for the 12 well-being dimensions. In addition, synergies and trade-offs among the various dimensions of well-being in Mexico are highlighted. Finally, the chapter explores the drivers of subjective well-being (life satisfaction) in the Mexican states.

This chapter introduces the well-being indicators to a broader audience through composite indices. Composite indices can be a useful tool for communication, since trends of multidimensional phenomena can be grasped more easily than across the many individual indicators. The chapter offers a summary picture of well-being in Mexican states obtained by normalising and aggregating the indicators for each dimension into a single score. Scores are defined on a relative scale, with the national averages at the most recent year equal to 100, which allows direct comparison among well-being dimensions and over time in a state. The chapter also discusses ways to improve the use of well-being indicators throughout the policy cycle (design, implementation and evaluation of policies). Finally, it provides indications of the statistical challenges ahead to improving the measurement of well-being at the sub-national level in Mexico.