How sustainable is well-being? Measuring resources for the future

This post, written by Carrie Exton (Statistics Directorate of the OECD), is part of the Wikiprogress series on How's Life? 2013 chapter on "Measuring the sustainability of well-being over time". 

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” So said Søren Kierkegaard.  It is certainly easier to make sense of events with hindsight. The financial crisis that began in 2007 is likely to become a textbook example of a catastrophic event that very few (or certainly not enough) people saw coming. The 2013 edition of “How’s Life?” shows the human cost of the financial crisis, reminding us that, much like stock market investments, people’s well-being can go down as well as up. So how can statistics help us to understand whether the choices made by current generations are likely to put the well-being of future generations at risk? 

Most statistics tend to look backwards. For one thing, it’s a lot easier to measure things that have already happened. But measures of progress also need to look forwards. That is why How’s Life? 2013 also includes a chapter about measuring the sustainability of well-being over time. It’s not the most attention-grabbing part of the report: there aren’t many pictures, and you won’t find a bar-chart showing which country is the ‘most sustainable’. What it does include is a proposal for how the OECD could monitor the resources which help to sustain well-being over time in the future.

It can be helpful to think about the sustainability of well-being in terms of risk-management, where measurement means identifying and regularly auditing risks. In several cases, we are already know something about where to look: you can read about the risks of climate change and financial meltdown in the newspapers almost every day. But some risks, such as those concerning social ties and trust, are less tangible. Getting good quality and internationally comparable data on each of these risks is harder still. Yet building an international picture is vital, because the sustainability of well-being is undoubtedly a global issue, with risks that require international cooperation if they are to be managed effectively. 

To gain a fuller understanding of risks, we need to start by mapping out what helps to sustain well-being over time. A recent UNECE/ Eurostat/ OECD Task Force for Measuring Sustainable Development identified four key types of resources that can be measured today, and that are likely to help shape the well-being of future generations: economic, natural, human, and social capital.  These resources are described as “capital” because they reflect the assets and liabilities that we carry forwards over time. For many people, capital means things like money and machines – and while these are important, they are certainly not the only resources that matter for well-being. So this notion of “capital” for well-being is very broad, and doesn’t necessarily mean measuring everything in terms of money. We know, for example, that there is often a difference between something’s price tag and its well-being value, and in many cases we are far from being able to estimate the size of that gap accurately.  

Click on image to enlarge

For several types of capital, the measurement effort is well underway. How’s Life? 2013 already includes some information about household wealth, education, levels of trust, and the environment. National accounts include information about economic capital; OECD’s Green Growth indicators and Environmental Outlook to 2050 (among others) describe several important types of natural capital; OECD’s skills surveys, health and labour statistics can help to inform estimates of human capital; and Statistics Directorate have recently set out a measurement agenda for social capital. 

For How’s Life? the next step will be to bring together a concise set of indicators that can capture resource stocks on a human scale, including where possible their evolution over time and their distribution across society. “Trans-boundary impacts” (i.e. the impacts that countries have on one another) and “flow” measures (such as investment, depletion and degradation) will also be important indicators – particularly where these highlight significant risk factors, such as in the case of carbon emissions. Measures also need to reflect the latest evidence on the thresholds or tipping points beyond which stocks of resources might be considered dangerously low or imbalanced. 

Stocks of resources or capital are not the only determinants of well-being over time, but they offer a practical way to examine links between the present and the future: through the accumulation or depletion of resource stocks, the choices made by one generation can influence the opportunities available to the next. It’s important to start measuring the sustainability of well-being alongside current well-being outcomes – the future is, after all, where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives.

- Carrie Exton

Our grandmothers and mothers did not fight for gender equality in vain

This blog by Carlotta Balestra, Policy Analyst in the Statistics Directorate of the OECD, is part of the Wikiprogress focus on the "Gender differences in well-being" chapter of the How's Life? 2013.

Women are now better off and more educated than in the past, have greater career prospects and can decide their own lives. But changes in the status of women are neither uniform nor universal, and full gender equality remains an unattained goal. In many emerging and developing economies women remain second-class citizens, lacking basic rights, and having more limited access to assets. In the rich world, while legal and political rights are granted, large gender gaps persist and in many areas women still walk a step behind men.  

Women have caught up with men in terms of education. In fact, in most of the OECD countries, girls now overtake boys in educational achievement, but they are still far less likely to choose computing and engineering as fields of study - subjects in great demand on the labour market in OECD countries and other regions.

Unsurprisingly, one of the most prominent gaps between men and women is still in the world of work. In rich countries, women made huge gains into the labour force, since 1970 the proportion of working-age women in paid work has risen from 48% to 59%. However, they still find it much harder to secure the most senior posts and, despite equal pay legislation, are paid less than men. That is partly because women are segregated into low-value jobs and often find themselves as part-timers or temporary workers. Across the OECD area, on average, full-time women’s salary is 16% lower than men’s. The gender wage gap is smaller than it was 40 years ago, but what is troubling is that it seems to have stalled over the past few years.

Many working women continue to have two jobs - one in the workplace and one at home. As the chart below illustrates, women still bear the brunt of household tasks, an imbalance that can hinder them from participating fully in the job market and building their careers. Although, the contribution of men to housework and child care has grown over the last 10 years, it still remains far below women’s. Across the OECD, women spend twice as much time as men on household chores and parenting. There are large variations from country to country: in a week the average Italian woman spends 22 hours (or almost 3 full-time workdays) more than her other half on unpaid work, while this gap averages 5 hours in Nordic countries. If both paid and unpaid work are combined the gender gap narrows, but it’s still the women who put in the longest hours.

Female minus male weekly hours worked

Women have won the right to vote and run for public office almost everywhere, but they still remain under-represented in national politics. In parliaments across the OECD area women hold on average 28% of the seats, though the Nordics do much better. In Finland – the first country to introduce universal suffrage – women make up 43% of the members of parliament. Female political leaders are nowadays less unusual – think of Brazil’s Dimla Rousseff, Costa Rica’s Laura Chinchilla Miranda, Denmark’s Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Germany’s Angela Merkel and South Korea’s Park Geun-hye – but still far from common, and one in three men across the OECD still thinks that men make better political leaders than women do.

In every country and culture, women face a high risk of being victims of physical or sexual violence by intimate partners. On average, across OECD countries, one in four women reports having been victim of intimate partner violence at least once in her life. This proportion goes up to 40% in Turkey and Mexico.

But life is not all rosy for men either. Men live shorter than women, are the primary targets of contact crime in the streets, have been hit harder by the recent economic downturn and report being less satisfied with their lives as a whole than women do. They are also confronted with new roles and social norms. The increasing share of women earning more than their partners over the past few years has called into question men’s traditional breadwinner role. While men are now supportive of their spouses when they help bring home some of the bacon, husbands aren’t always as enthusiastic when their wives start bringing home the ‘filet mignon’.

  

How’s Life? 2013 is now available. Read free on-line @ www.oecd.org/howslife, and directly on OECD iLibrary: http://oe.cd/mr

How’s Life? 2013 – Focusing on people

This blog by Martine Durand, Chief Statistician and Director of the Statistics Directorate at the OECD, is part of the Wikiprogress  focus on the How's Life? 2013 report for the month of November 2013. 

Measuring better lives has become even more important today, as many of our economies and societies have been stricken by the global financial crisis. Understanding how the lives of people have been affected and designing the best strategies to help those who have suffered the most requires looking well beyond the impact of the crisis on economic production and financial markets.

The global financial crisis has seriously affected economic well-being

Many workers have lost their jobs since the start of the crisis in 2007 and many households have registered stagnating or declining levels of income and wealth.Today, there are nearly 15 million more unemployed people in the OECD area than before the crisis, and the number of people out of job for more than a year has reached 16 million. Meanwhile, between 2007 and 2010, relative income poverty rose in most OECD countries, especially among children and young people. Rising economic insecurity and financial strain have particularly hit low-income and low-educated households.

Trust in institutions has weakened

Other aspects of people’s well-being have also evolved in a negative way during the crisis. Life satisfaction fell considerably in the countries most severely hit by the crisis, such as Greece, Italy, and Spain, and in these countries more people reported experiencing high levels of stress and worry. Countries’ political capital has been severely undermined, as today only 40% of citizens in the OECD trust their national governments – the lowest level since 2006. And in countries most affected by the crisis, only between one and three citizens out of ten trust their governments, a ratio that has more than halved since the start of the crisis.

New forms of solidarity and engagement have emerged

In some countries, responses to the crisis went beyond public policy and also came from local communities, in the forms of higher interpersonal solidarity and different forms of civic participation. While people have found it more difficult to provide financial help, an increasing number report having provided other types of support to others, and having volunteered their time to help those in need in their community. Families have also been a source of support, both financial and in-kind, and have provided an important safety net, for instance to young people who had difficulty finding a job.

Well-being indicators offer new insights for policy making

Well-being metrics can provide a new and wider perspective to policy-makers in the areas that matter to people. Some of these areas have long been on their radar screen, such as jobs, health or education, but the more comprehensive set of outcome indicators at the individual or household levels contained in How’s Life? and their joint distribution across population groups can offer new insights on people’s conditions. This edition of How’s Life? explores in some detail two measurement issues in well-being that may offer new food for thought for policy making: gender gaps in well-being and well-being in the workplace.

Can women and men have it all?

The question of how well-being varies across population groups and why is fundamental to design better targeted and more effective policies. While much progress on gender equality has been achieved over the past decades, in a number of countries, gender remains an important determinant of well-being inequalities in the population. But contrary to the usual picture that captures economic conditions only, the gender gap is not always just a women’s issue. For instance, women live longer than men on average in the OECD and they are often more educated. However, women report a lower health status, have worse job prospects and fewer networks to rely on when looking for a job. Women also experience more often negative feelings than men.

Well-being in the workplace: The importance of quality jobs

For many years, the focus of policy has mainly been on providing job opportunities and ensuring that people who wanted to work could find a job. However, most people spend a large part of their lives working and what happens in the workplace is an essential determinant of overall well-being. Having a good or quality job does not just mean receiving good salaries or having dynamic careers; it also means working in an environment that is conducive to personal accomplishment and where people are committed. People’s engagement and high sense of well-being at work depend a lot on whether they have autonomy in their job andare given well-defined work objectives. Respectful and supportive management practices and support from colleagues are also important.When jobs and workplaces combine these factors, people are more apt to manage work pressure and emotionally demanding jobs, and they also tend to be healthier and more productive.

Focusing on what matters to people, and improving existing metrics or developing new ones to measure well-being and progress, is the way ahead to achieve better lives, today and tomorrow.

Martine Durand

OECD Chief Statistician

Director of the Statistics Directorate

How’s Life? 2013 is available from 5 November. Read free on-line @ www.oecd.org/howslife, and directly on OECD iLibrary: http://oe.cd/mr

The week in review

Hello, glad you could join us for the Wikiprogress week in review - a handful of headlines that have caught our eyes over the last week. You can find all news articles and blog posts on the progress community in the Wikiprogress Community Portal .    

On wikis
2012 Top 100 NGOs: #1 Wikimedia Foundation (The Global Journal 26.01.2012)
The Wikimedia Foundation is best known for its most famous initiative, Wikipedia. The Foundation operates under the belief that information is a not-for-profit commodity; the Wikimedia Foundation has been instrumental to the global phenomenon of user-generated content and the mass sharing of information.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on wikis

On growth and development
Sustainable Humanity (Project Syndicate 31.01.2012)
Developmental Economist Jeffrey Sachs calls for the mobilisation of new technologies shaped by social values in ensuring sustainable development incorporates equality in economic growth and protection of natural resources.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on sustainable development

On measuring progress
The OECD recently produced the video, How’s Life: Measuring Progress – asking experts, “What well-being and sustainability measures are needed to go ‘Beyond GDP’”?
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on the Better Life Initiative

On social development
UN Commission on Social Development kicks off with focus on poverty and youth (UN News Centre 02.02.2012)
In 2011 there were 75 million youths without a job; UN figures show that young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. Over the next 10 days the UN Commission on social development will focus on youth unemployment, poverty eradication and socially inclusive policies.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on employment rates

On gender equality
Land rights for women can help ease India’s child malnutrition crisis (Guardian 20.01.2012)
India has developed significantly over the past decade; however malnutrition rates are among the worst in the world with 45% of children under 5 suffering from malnutrition. New research shows that allowing women ownership of the land they farm could drastically reduce these figures.
See more and contribute to the Wikigender article on access to land

In the Spotlight: UN High Level Panel Report on Global Sustainability - Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing (United Nations 30.01.2012)

A 22-member Panel was established by the Secretary-General in August 2010 to formulate a new blueprint for sustainable development and low-carbon prosperity. The Panel's final report, "Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing", contains 56 recommendations to put sustainable development into practice and to mainstream it into economic policy as quickly as possible.

Read more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on sustainable development.

We hope you will tune in the same time next week. In the meantime, if anything interesting passes your desk that you would like to see in the next Wikiprogress week in review, please tweet it to us  @Wikiprogress  or post it on our  Facebook page

Yours in progress,

Philippa Lysaght