Overview of the System of Community Accounts (Up To and Beyond Stiglitz)

1. Overview of the System of Community Accounts(Up To and Beyond Stiglitz) Doug May* Alton Hollett** Robert Reid** • *MemorialUniversity • ** Government of Newfoundland and Labrador

2. System of Community Accounts Well-Being Accounts Production Accounts

3. Well-Being Accounts in SCA Well-Being Health Consumption/Income Relationships Work Community Demographics Education Society Time Environment

4. Production Accounts in SCA Gross Outputs Services Resources Infrastructure Materials Labour Capital Land M&E Bldgs Eco-system

5. To Well-Being From The Production Economy Environment Trade with Others Health Social Relationships Income, Consumption, Leisure Demographics Well-Being Employment Machinery Community Safety & Social Vitality Knowledge R&D Eco-System Plant & Buildings Society Culture, Politics and Justice Education Natural Resources Capital Stock GDP Production Services Engineering Infrastructure Materials Human Capital

6. Domain Dimensions: Groups, Time, Space Time Seniors ? Youth Space Children ? Immigrants ? Women Disabled ? ? Aboriginals

7. Stiglitz Commission’s Recommendations • 1. When evaluating material well-being, look at consumption and income rather than production. • 2. Emphasize the household perspective. • 3. Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth. • 4. Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth. • 5. Broaden income to non-market activities. • 6.Quality of life depends on people’s objective conditions and capabilities. Steps should be taken to improve measures of people’s health, education, personal activities and environmental conditions. In particular, substantial effort should be devoted to developing and implementing robust, reliable measures of social connections, political voice, and insecurity that can be used to predict life satisfaction. • -

8. Recommendations Continued • 7. Quality-of-life indicators in all dimensions covered should address inequalities in a comprehensive way. • 8. Surveys should be designed to address the links between various quality-of-life domains for each person , and this information should be used when designing policies in the various fields. • 9. Statistical offices should provide the information needed to aggregate across quality-of-life dimensions, allowing the construction of different indexes. • 10. Measures of both objective and subjective well-being provide key information about people’s quality of life. Statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture people’s life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities in their own surveys. • - • -

9. Recommendations Continued • 11. Sustainability assessment requires a well-defined dashboard of indicators. The distinctive feature of the components of this dashboard should be that they are interpretable as variations of some underlying “stocks”. A monetary index of sustainability has its place in such a dashboard but, under the current state of the art, it should remain essentially focused in economic aspects of sustainability. • 12. The environmental aspects of sustainability deserve a separate follow-up based on a well-chosen set of physical indicators. In particular there is a need for a clear indicator of our proximity to dangerous levels of environmental damage (such as associated with climate change or the depletion of fish stocks).

10. Additional Value-added of SCAs • Aggregating up from the individual and the household with the next stop being our communities and neighbourhoods and not only states or provinces. • A wider perspective on well-being to incorporate all the aspects of individual and household experiences as well as those in community and society that are important to people. • Spatial analysis is important. Move to non-administrative boundaries. Distinction between national and domestic. • Estimating relationships amongst domains and indicators/variables. “Correlations are important” Fleurbaey 2009. (Determinants of Quality of Life).

11. More AV-A • Using “equivalent incomes” to estimate impact of alternative social states. Fleurbaey, Van Praag. • Making use of distributions e.g. “cigar diagrams. • Newer measures of low incomes such as the MBM and the use of Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke measure of the poverty incidence, gap and intensity. • Estimating indicators for communities that currently only exist at a more aggregate level (developing SAE algorithms). • Gapminder “Motion Charts” to show relationships and dynamics. • User determined aggregation weights to determine well-being.

12. More AV-A • Evolution is important in planning policies now for the future. Developing agent interactive evolutionary models for neighbourhoods and communities associated with meta-micro (individual) databases. • Interfacing with Google maps to provide layering and infrastructure location. • Code to improve ease of input and editing as well as speed in output creation. • Ability to optimally locate local services according to need.

13. Conclusions • Main contribution of Stiglitz and OECD work is to “legitimize” the framework and vision that others are pursuing.

14. Fleurbaey, Marc. 2009. “Beyond GDP: The quest for a Measure of Social Welfare” Journal of Economic Literature, 47(4): 1029-1075 • Stiglitz, Joseph E., Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. 2009. Report by The Commission on The Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/en/index.htm • European Commission. 2009. GDP and beyond: Measuring progress in a changing world, www.beyond-gdp.eu • Power, Conrad. 2009. “A Spatial Agent-Based Model of N-Person Prisoner’s Dilemma Co-operation in a Socio-Geographic Community” Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, jass.soc.surrey.ac.uk/12/1/8.html