According to the Social Progress Index, Australia's education, medical care and nutrition levels have helped the country tie with New Zealand to reach ninth overall, but low levels of tolerance and inclusiveness kept Australia's overall ranking below Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands. 

The survey, which combines measures of wellbeing, opportunity and basic needs through 16 outcomes researched by Gallup, UNESCO and the Pew Research Centre, found Australia had among the highest standards of living of any country in the world with a diverse population. 

"We lead the world on access to clean water, secondary education and freedom of expression; we are the fourth healthiest nation in the world and rank fifth for access to advanced education," Deloitte Australia public sector and healthcare partner Fran Thorn said. 

"Yet like many other advanced nations, we have made very little gains in the past four years, relative to what our gross domestic product indicates is possible to advance social progress."

Australia was pushed down to ninth from fourth position last year because its inclusion of immigrants was among the lowest in the top 10, according to Gallup World Poll data.  

The Turnbull government announced immigration measures in April this year that will see further tough restrictions on skilled migrants and has been widely criticised by the international community for the treatment of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru. 

Australia kept its place in the top 10 largely due to its strong performance in the opportunity section of the index.

This included high ratings for religious freedom, protections for the early marriage of women, availability of contraception, and comparably low levels of corruption. 

Canada, Australia, Ireland and Britain also outperformed countries at a similar level of gross domestic product per capita on access to education.

The world's top performer on the index was Denmark, with all five Nordic countries hitting the highest band and Canada the best performing of the world's top seven economies. 

Globally, 113 countries out of the 128 countries surveyed had improved their level of social progress since 2014.

"But this progress remains slow and uneven," authors Michael Porter, Scott Stern and Michael Green found. 

The report concluded that if the world were a country, it would rank between Indonesia and Botswana, with a population-weighted score of 65 compared to Australia's 89 out of 100, indicating an improvement in the global social progress score of 2.6 per cent in the past three years. 

"We find that overall social progress is improving but there are components that have experienced deeply worrying erosion," the authors said.  

They found access to information and communications and access to advanced education had improved markedly in a short period of time.

"This improvement is in sharp contrast to declines or stagnation in personal rights, personal safety, and tolerance and inclusion," they said.