Transcript MNW ONS Presentation

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?
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)!
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”
Stiglitz framework
• Classical GDP issues (5 recs)
Incl alternative measures; income, consumption and
wealth jointly and distributions; households; nonmarket 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
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.
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
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
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
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!