Despite being under siege from Western imperialism, 20th century socialist projects still generally achieved superior results in measures of physical quality of life compared to capitalist countries when adjusting for levels of economic development:

In 30 of 36 comparisons between countries at similar levels of economic development, socialist countries showed more favorable PQL outcomes ( p < .05 by two-tailed t-test). This work with the World Bank's raw data included cross-tabulations, analysis of variance, and regression techniques, which all confirmed the same conclusions. The data indicated that the socialist countries generally have achieved better PQL outcomes than the capitalist countries at equivalent levels of economic development.