According to a new report, the UK now has one of the highest qualities of life among the advanced countries of the world.

The UK was ahead of Japan, the US, France and Italy and bit lower than Germany on the "Social Progress Index". The new Social Progress Index is an international measure that has been designed to determine the economic standards of nations. The index also showed that the UK is among the fattest countries in the world.

Overall, the country ranked 13th out of 132 countries around the world in the international barometer of success that combines statistics on a host of aspects including health, housing, educational standards and water quality. The index, compiled by a team of economists led by Prof Michael Porter, of Harvard Business School in the US, is designed as an alternative to traditional measures such as Gross Domestic Product that su purely based on economic standard.

Experts used data from more than 50 institutions including World Health Organisation on quality of life and success, and assigned a single score to each notion. New Zealand scored the highest on the table with the title of the best place in the world on measures as diverse as individual rights and sanitation, just ahead of Switzerland, Iceland and the Netherlands.