GOING BEYOND GDP TO FOSTER “BETTER POLICIES FOR BETTER LIVES”
The “Better Life” initiative of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development provides the first collection of internationally comparable well-being indicators to assess whether progress is being made by the people not just by the economy, says the organization’s chief statistician.
Ms Martine
Durand, in Paris. Ms Durand is the Chief Statistician and Director of the Statistics Directorate of the Oganization for Economic Co-opeartion and Development (OECD). Formally the OECD’s Deputy Director of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, Ms Durand is now responsible for the OECD’s work on the measurement of well- being and the progress of societies.
Ms Martine Durand
For the last half-century, the mission of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development), whose origins lie in European post- war reconstruction, has been to promote policies conducive to higher economic growth. However, over the decades, the
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organization’s work has evolved so that its agenda now encompasses almost the full range of economic, social and environmental issues confronting developed, emerging and developing countries around the world. In recent years, the OECD has been at the forefront of a movement to rethink the way policy makers and societies at large should define and measure individual and social well-being for most of the last century, "progress" has been equated with economic growth, and GDP (a measure of the quantity of goods and services produced in a country in a given time period) has been the most widely-used measure of social welfare. While there are obvious links between the economic conditions of a country and the wellbeing of its citizens, GDP alone
provides only a partial view of what matters the most in people’s lives: GDP is, by and large, limited to the production of goods and services exchanged through markets; it includes activities that remedy some of the costs of economic development; and it ignores changes in people's attributes (e.g. their health status, their skills) that shape their well-being. Further, GDP says nothing about the sustainability or equity of prevailing conditions. The ongoing crisis has made it clear that, in order to guide the development of our societies, we need to go beyond the one- dimensional focus on GDP and develop more sophisticated, multi- dimensional tools to measure social progress. To this end, during its 50th