streams and has led to two major outputs: “Your Better Life Index”, an interactive web tool, and “How’s Life? Measuring Well-being”, a report comparing well-being across OECD countries. The conceptual underpinnings for these products, and of all work related to the Better Life Initiative, is provided by a framework that distinguishes between current well-being and its sustainability, and that describes the former through the two spheres of material conditions (i.e. people's command over economic resources) and quality of life (i.e. people's attributes, feelings and evaluations). Overall, the OECD framework identifies 11 dimensions of well-being that have a claim to be relevant to people around the world, whatever the level of economic development of the country where they live:
• Income and wealth • Jobs and Earnings • Housing • Health status • Work-life balance • Education and skills • Social Connections • Civic Engagement and
Governance
• Environmental Quality • Personal Security • Subjective well-being
The selection of indicators for
each of these dimensions has been informed by a number of principles to ensure their quality and policy-relevance. Official statistical sources have been used wherever possible. However, for some dimensions (such as social connections and subjective wellbeing), where no comparable data produced by National Statistical Offices currently exist, the OECD has also relied on non- official statistics, which were included as “placeholders” until comparable indicators become available from official sources. A particular emphasis was put on going beyond national averages to compile data on the distribution of outcomes across households and individuals. Indicators were chosen for their ability to show information about outcomes rather than inputs and outputs (e.g. focusing on measures such as life expectancy or educational attainment rates rather than government expenditure on healthcare and
118 | The Parliamentarian | 2012: Issue Two
education). Finally, the selected indicators combine both objective and subjective measures. While the value of data based on people self- reports has long been recognized by official statisticians, measuring well-being also requires gathering information that only the person concerned can provide. This is the case of subjective well-being, a short-hand for people's feelings (e.g. of joy and pain) and evaluations (regarding their life as a whole and for selected dimensions). This is a new area for official statistics1
and the OECD is
currently developing guidelines for statistical agencies interested in collecting such measures. The indicators included in the
Better Life Initiative have also been chosen to fulfil standard statistical requirements, such as:
• Having face validity, i.e. the capacity to capture what is intended to be measured; • Being commonly used and accepted as well-being indicators within the statistical and academic communities; • Focusing on summary outcomes that can be easily understood (e.g. displaying no
ambiguity in interpretation, showing either good/bad performance or progress/regress when looking at change over time); • Lending themselves to disaggregation across population groups, allowing to assess disparities; • Being amenable to change and sensitive to policy interventions; • Ensuring broad comparability across countries and maximum country coverage; and • Being collected through a recurrent instrument.
These criteria define the
characteristics of a hypothetical “ideal” set of indicators for monitoring well-being across countries and over time. In practice, finding indicators that meet all these criteria equally well is challenging and will remain so for quite some time. While the current choice of indicators represents a good approximation of the ideal concepts, the selection will be improved in the future as better statistics become available.