Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress

1. Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress Main recommendations and Impact on Social Statistics S. Lollivier - Insee

2. Recommendations 1 & 2:-When evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production -Emphasise the household perspective • Focused on national accounts • Upgrading households’ disposable income and final consumption aggregates • More specifically: • Net adjusted disposable income (including public non market services such as health and education) • Final consumption, including public non market services such as health and education S. Lollivier - Insee

3. Recommendation 3:Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth • Income and consumption should be complemented with information on wealth • Construction of balance sheet accounts for households should be promoted S. Lollivier - Insee

4. Recommendation 4:Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth • Average measures of income, consumption and wealth should be accompanied by indicators that reflect their distribution, e.g. median and quintiles • This will require stronger linkages between household surveys and national accounts figures S. Lollivier - Insee

5. Recommendation 5:Broaden income measures to non-market activities • Many services that households produce for themselves are not recognised in official income and production measures • Comprehensive and periodic accounts of household activity as satellites to the core national accounts should complement the picture • Time-use surveys are a major source for these data • Comparisons of living standards over time and across countries need to also take into account the amount of leisure that people enjoy S. Lollivier - Insee

6. Recommendation6: 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 shown to predict life satisfaction S. Lollivier - Insee

7. Recommendation 6 (continued) • Measuring all these features of quality of life requires both objective and subjective data • The challenge is to improve existing statistical sources, to identify gaps, and to invest in statistical capacity in areas where available indicators remain deficient S. Lollivier - Insee

8. Recommendation 7:Quality of life indicators should assess inequalities in a comprehensive way • Inequalities in quality of life should be assessed across people, socio-economic groups, gender and generations, with special attention to more recent sources of inequalities, such as those liked to immigration S. Lollivier - Insee

9. Recommendation 8:Surveys should be designed to assess the links between various quality-of-life domains for each person, and this information should be used when designing policies in various fields • The consequences for quality of life of having multiple disadvantages far exceed the sum of their individual effects • Information on the “joint distribution” of the most salient features of quality of life should be based on dedicated surveys • Including in all surveys some standard questions that allow classifying respondents based on a limited set of characteristics S. Lollivier - Insee

10. Recommendation 9:Statistical offices should provide information needed to aggregate across quality-of-life dimensions, allowing the construction of different indexes • A strong demand to develop a single summary measure • Some are already being used: • Average levels of life-satisfaction for a country • Composite indices such as the Human Development index • Others could be implemented: • Proportion of one’s time in which the strongest reported feeling is a negative one • Counting the occurrence and severity of various objective features of people’ s lives • Equivalent-income measures based on people’s state s and preferences S. Lollivier - Insee

11. Recommendation 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 surveys • Each aspect of subjective well-being should be measured separately: cognitive evaluation of one’s life, positive emotions, negative emotions • The types of questions that have proved their value within small-scale and unofficial surveys should be included in larger-scale surveys of official statistical offices S. Lollivier - Insee

12. Recommendations 11 and 12:Sustainable development and environment • The assessment of sustainability is complementary to current well-being or economic performance, and must be examined separately • Sustainability requires the simultaneous preservation or increase in quantity and quality of natural resources, and of human, social and physical capital S. Lollivier - Insee

13. Sustainable development and environment (continued) • Is it possible to have an aggregate view of all stocks, using a monetary equivalent? No, it is not possible at the time being. • A more modest approach: • Focusing the monetary aggregation on physical capital, human capital, and some natural resources • Using separate sets of physical indicators to monitor the state of the environment, identified with the help of the scientific community S. Lollivier - Insee

14. What is next ? • The report is opening a discussion rather than closing it • National and international bodies should discuss the recommendations in this report • The discussion on recommendations should identify their limits and see how best national and international bodies can contribute to this broad agenda S. Lollivier - Insee