Opposite page and this page: Educational skills and income and wealth are two of the 11 dimensions of well-being identified by the OECD that have a claim to be relevant to people around the world.
The Better Life Initiative is an on- going project aiming to supply the information necessary for governments and citizens to answer the question: “Are our lives getting better?” As such, it is an essential component of the OECD’s mission to foster “Better Policies for Better Lives”.
2011, the OECD launched the “Better Life Initiative”, combining data and research from across the organization and beyond to provide the first collection of internationally comparable well-being indicators.
Measuring progress in theory and practice The Better Life Initiative represents the culmination of almost a decade of OECD-led dialogue and debate on the role of statistics in defining "progress” in the public and policy spheres. The first OECD World Forum on “Statistics, Knowledge and Policy” – held in Palermo, Italy in 2004 – brought together representatives from civil society, academia, government and national statistical offices to discuss the meaning and measurement of “progress”.
Emerging clearly from this event was the sense that a gap existed between the statistics most commonly used to measure changing conditions, and the realities and priorities of people’s lives, which needed to be addressed. In the intervening years, two more World Fora (in Istanbul in 2007 and in Busan in 2009), as well as many projects launched by other international and national organizations, have added momentum to the drive to develop better well-being metrics. In particular, an expert
Commission established by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, and led by Nobel-prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, was asked to assess the adequacy of existing measures of economic performance and social progress. The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi report published in 2009, to which the OECD contributed, made around
30 recommendations for statistical development, including: the need to collect more individual-level (as opposed to national aggregate- level) data to better understand inequalities in household conditions; the need to develop better measures of economic, social and environmental sustainability; and the need to measure well-being across multiple dimensions, encompassing both subjective and objective aspects. These recommendations, along with years of dialogue with groups and individuals from all sectors of society through the OECD-hosted “Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies”, have provided the conceptual basis for the OECD’s current efforts to move from theory to practice in well-being measurement. The Better Life Initiative
encompasses many different work The Parliamentarian | 2012: Issue Two | 117