Transcript From The Well-Being To - National Statistical Service

Overview of the System of Community
Accounts
(Up To and Beyond Stiglitz)
Doug May*
Alton Hollett**
Robert Reid**
*Memorial University
** Government of Newfoundland
and Labrador
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System of Community Accounts
Well-Being
Accounts
Production
Accounts
2
Well-Being Accounts in SCA
Well-Being
Relationships
Health
Work
Community
Demographics
Education
Society
Time
Consumption/Income
3
Environment
Production Accounts in SCA
Gross Outputs
Resources Infrastructure
Services
Materials
Capital
Land
M&E
Labour
Bldgs
Eco-system
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From The Production Economy To Well-Being
Environment
Health
Social
Relationships
Income,
Consumption,
Leisure
Demographics
Employment
Machinery
Community
Safety & Social
Vitality
Eco-System
Plant &
Buildings
Knowledge
R&D
Natural
Resources
Capital Stock
Education
Society Culture,
Politics and
Justice
Services
Engineering
Infrastructure
Materials
Human Capital
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Domain Dimensions: Groups, Time, Space
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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 nonadministrative boundaries. Distinction between national
and domestic.
• Estimating relationships amongst domains and
indicators/variables. “Correlations are important”
Fleurbaey 2009. (Determinants of Quality of Life). 10
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
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well-being.
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.
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Conclusions
• Main contribution of Stiglitz and OECD work is
to “legitimize” the framework and vision that
others are pursuing.
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• 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-senfitoussi.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 NPerson Prisoner’s Dilemma Co-operation in a SocioGeographic Community” Journal of Artificial Societies and
Social Simulation, jass.soc.surrey.ac.uk/12/1/8.html
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