1 / 10

Welcome to the Measuring Societal Wellbeing Seminar 4th Oct 2010

Welcome to the Measuring Societal Wellbeing Seminar 4th Oct 2010 Looking at how we take forward the Stiglitz, Sen & Fitoussi agenda across the UK. There’s more to life than GDP but how do we measure it?. Paul Allin Deputy Director: Societal Wellbeing, ONS. What is societal wellbeing?.

sulwyn
Download Presentation

Welcome to the Measuring Societal Wellbeing Seminar 4th Oct 2010

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Welcome to the Measuring Societal Wellbeing Seminar 4th Oct 2010 Looking at how we take forward the Stiglitz, Sen & Fitoussi agenda across the UK

  2. There’s more to life than GDP but how do we measure it? Paul Allin Deputy Director: Societal Wellbeing, ONS

  3. What is societal wellbeing? Wellbeing Quality of life Happiness Life satisfaction Welfare Sustainability • A multi-dimensional measure of the progress of society • Economic, environment and social dimensions • Difficult to theorise, define and measure • It’s big picture stuff (potentially linked to lots of detail)!

  4. Why measure wellbeing? • Well known problem • more to life than GDP • Social Trends, SDIs, etc • New impetus • Academic, political, international • Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi report • Budget June 2010 “The Government is committed to developing broader indicators of well-being and sustainability”

  5. Stiglitz framework • Classical GDP issues (5 recs) • Incl alternative measures; income, consumption and wealth jointly and distributions; households; non-market activities • Quality of life (5 recs) • Objective and subjective measures, inequalities, links and aggregate indexes • Sustainable developt & environment (2 recs) • Dashboard, stocks, economic and physical • Discuss incl at national round-tables

  6. Measures of economic activity • GDP, although important, has limitations for measuring societal wellbeing. • Additional measures of National Income in theory provide better measures of societal wellbeing – e.g. NDP, GNI, NNI. • Go beyond National Income measures and look at household income and expenditure to better understand material wellbeing. Chiripanhura, B (2010) Measures of economic activity and their implications for societal wellbeing, August 2010, ELMR, ONS.

  7. Measures of subjective wellbeing • ONS research into what subjective questions are being asked. • Life satisfaction/happiness measures already collected on a range of surveys and presented in DEFRA SDIs. • Role for ONS to collect subjective wellbeing data on its household surveys? (eg LA ests) • How could high quality subjective wellbeing data inform public debate and policy making? Waldron, S (2010) Measuring Subjective Wellbeing in the UK, September 2010, Working Paper, ONS

  8. Proposed way forward • Cross government work led by National Statistician • Ministerial group/advisory board • National debate developed in stages • Review of SDIs • Subjective wellbeing measures • Better engagement with international developments • Long term process moving to wider measures

  9. Resources, resources, resources • Existing evidence base Social Trends, SDIs, income and wealth distribution etc, Wellbeing Knowledge Bank • Using existing networks eg APPG on Wellbeing Economics? • SR10 bid incl for subjective wellbeing • Joining up with related initiatives SDI review, national themes, impact indicators, data review, SITF, Big Society, international

  10. Welcome your comments/questions • Extent of interest among Ministers and policy colleagues • Fit with related initiatives • Ensuring high level engagement across Whitehall • Conducting an effective national debate • Sustainability of existing sources to exploit Thank you!

More Related