How's Life? 2013

OECD

• Publisher: OECD
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9789264220096
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Chapter 1. The OECD Better Life Initiative: Concepts and indicators1

What drives people’s and nations’ well-being and where do countries need to improve to achieve greater progress for all? Building on more than 10 years of OECD work on measuring well-being and progress, the OECD Better Life Initiative launched in 2011 addresses these questions through evidence on 11 dimensions. The framework developed by the OECD to measure well-being distinguishes between current and future well-being. Current well-being is measured in terms of both material conditions and quality of life. The chapter also describes a range of statistical advancements made on measuring well-being since the previous edition of How’s Life?. For example, significant progress has been made in some areas, such as income and wealth, education, environment and subjective well-being. This progress needs to be sustained while in other well-being areas statistical challenges still remain.

The OECD Better Life Initiative and beyond

Are our lives getting better, and if they are, how do we know? How can we measure improvements in well-being, not just economic growth? Is well-being shared fairly among different groups in society, such as the young and the elderly, men and women? How can we be sure that actions to achieve better lives today are not undermining tomorrow’s well-being? The question of how to measure well-being and societal progress is one that the OECD has been addressing for more than a decade, resulting in the OECD Better Life Initiative in 2011. The Better Life Initiative focuses on the aspects of life that matter to people and that, together, shape their lives. It comprises a regularly updated set of well-being indicators and an analysis, published in How’s Life? as well as an interactive web application, the Better Life Index (Box 1.1). It also includes a number of methodological and research projects to improve the information base towards a better understanding of well-being trends and their drivers.2

Box 1.1. The Better Life Index

The Better Life Index (BLI) has been designed to involve people in the discussion on well-being and, through this process, to learn what matters the most to them. The Better Life Index (Figure 1.1) is an interactive tool that allows users to set their own weights on the 11 dimensions of the OECD well-being framework (Figure 1.2). The web application allows users to see how countries’ average achievements compare based on one’s own personal priorities in life, and to share one’s index and choices of weights with other people in their networks and with the OECD. Since its launch in May 2011, the BLI has been visited by more than 2.6 million people from all over the world. Around 44 000 indices have been shared with the OECD. The information gathered from these users shows that on average what matters most to them is life satisfaction, health and education.

Figure 1.1. The OECD Better Life Index web application

Note: The screenshot shows the BLI visualisation. Countries are represented by flowers with eleven petals, corresponding to the well-being dimensions (see Figure 1.2). Users can rate these dimensions by using the control panel in the right-hand side of the screen. When dimensions are rated, flowers change size to reflect the importance attributed by users. At the same time, countries move up (down) if they perform well (poorly) in the dimension of well-being that users rate the highest.

Source: The OECD Better Life Index, www.betterlifeindex.org.

While work on well-being and progress originated in academic and policy circles, measuring well-being is now a prominent item on the agenda of many statistical offices. This reflects the wide-spread recognition that well-being statistics are critical for informing policy making on a regular and systematic basis on a range of aspects that matter to the life of ordinary people.

Over the past few years, many countries have launched their own initiatives to measure well-being (see www.wikiprogress.org for a comprehensive rolling review of existing initiatives). Several of these initiatives were presented at a series of OECD regional conferences and at the 4th OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy that took place in New Delhi in October 2012. The large and increasing number of such initiatives demonstrates the interest globally for indicators and analysis that go beyond GDP. They also show a strong convergence in conceptual frameworks and indicators used (see Box 1.2).

Box 1.2. Recent national initiatives on measuring well-being and progress

While work on well-being and progress originated in academic or policy circles (e.g. Club of Rome, the OECD Global Project, etc.), the notion of well-being is now prominent on the agenda of many National Statistical Offices (NSOs). Selected recent projects undertaken by NSOs or governments include:1

• Australia: The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) published its first Measures of Australia’s Progress (MAP) in 2002, with updates in 2010 and 2012. In 2011, ABS carried out an extensive community consultation (MAP 2.0) to improve MAP. This consultation involved individuals, community leaders and experts to provide guidance on the goals and aspirations of Australians. The feedback collected through a series of conferences, web-consultations and panels exposed some of the gaps in the picture provided by the indicators previously used in the MAP initiative, and led to the identification of “governance” as a new domain of progress. The outcomes of this consultation have subsequently been used by ABS to improve the statistical framework used to measure progress. The refreshed MAP will be released in November 2013.
• Austria: In 2012, Statistik Austria launched a new dataset (How’s Austria?) comprising 30 headline indicators in three areas: material wealth, quality of life and environmental sustainability. In the same year, the Economy Ministry together with the Austrian Research Institute WIFO published a study (Mehr als Wachstum, “More than Growth”), which complemented the OECD How’s Life? indicators set with additional indicators on domains identified as especially relevant by Austrian people. In interviews, Austrians were asked to rate the importance of indicators and dimensions for their own well-being, with the indicators aggregated accordingly to derive a composite index of Austrian well-being.
• France: Since the publication of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report,2 the French National Statistical Office (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques, INSEE) has introduced quality of life variables in existing household surveys and has introduced a specific multi-modal survey on quality of life. This survey enabled, for the first time, joint measurement of all the objective and subjective quality of life dimensions recommended in the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report (Stiglitz et al., 2009).
• Italy: In 2011 the Italian National Statistical Office (Istituto nazionale di statistica, ISTAT) and the National Council on the Economy and Labour (CNEL) established a joint “Steering Group on the Measurement of Progress in Italian Society”, including representatives from firms, trade unions and civil society. The Group developed a multi-dimensional framework for measuring “equitable and sustainable well-being” (BES – benessere equo e sostenibile), building on an open consultation with experts, civil society and citizens (through surveys and on-line) to identify the dimensions of well-being that a...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Legal and rights
• Foreword
• Editorial: Focusing on people
• Reader’s guide
• Executive summary
• Chapter 1. The OECD Better Life Initiative: Concepts and indicators
• Chapter 2. How’s Life? at a Glance
• Chapter 3. Well-being and the global financial crisis
• Chapter 4. Gender differences in well-being: Can women and men have it all?
• Chapter 5. Well-being in the workplace: Measuring job quality
• Chapter 6. Measuring the sustainability of well-being over time
• Glossary
• About the OECD