Macroeconomic Measurement - Enviromental And Social Dimensions

Principles of Economics in Context, Second Edition CHAPTER 21: MACROECONOMIC MEASUREMENT: ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS As discussed in Chapter 20, GDP is a good (though not perfect) summary of the annual flow of marketed goods and services through the economic system. In the 80plus years since the introduction of national income accounting in major industrial countries, GDP has become the official barometer of living standards and business cycles. It appears in newspapers and political debates as an indicator of economic, political, and social progress and it is widely used in formulating national and international policies. Although GDP numbers are widely used as a proxy for national success, GDP was never intended to play such a role. Economists dating back to Simon Kuznets, the originator of U.S. national accounting systems, have warned that GDP is a specialized tool for measuring market activity, which should not be confused with national wellbeing. National well-being is affected by social and environmental factors, such as inequality, political participation, security, quality of health care and education, and access to clean air and water, which are no less important than marketed economic activity. We need to account for these factors in order to develop a more complete measure of well-being. In Chapter 19, we mentioned that neglect of the questions of “what, how, and for whom” can mean that growth in production per capita may not lead to increased welfare. Now we can examine in more detail the problems that arise from focusing on production alone—or from focusing only on the money value of output, with too little attention to the details of what is being produced and how it affects human well-being. In order to understand this more complete picture of the economy, national governments need to start gathering new kinds of data and creating new indicators. In addition, the use of alternative measures to GDP—some of which are discussed in this chapter—may have important implications for policymaking. Before we begin to discuss specific options for adjusting, replacing, or supplementing GDP, we first need to ask ourselves three important questions: 1. What should we measure? GDP measures only economic production. Are there some things that GDP excludes that should be included as a component of wellbeing, such as health outcomes or environmental quality? Should some parts of GDP be excluded because they harm well-being, in the short or long term? 2. What should be used as the unit of measurement? Although GDP is measured in dollars, what units should be used to measure other variables affecting well-being, such as education, health, levels of crime, or environmental quality? 3. Should we seek to combine disparate well-being indicators into a single “bottomline” number, or should we keep the variables disaggregated (i.e., split up into component categories)? One tempting approach is to convert all variables to dollars to allow for comparability. But what techniques can we use to measure variables such as environmental quality or social capital in dollars, and should we even try? This chapter presents some alternatives to national accounting that address these questions and reflect our growing awareness of the importance of social and environmental contexts of economic activity. We begin by listing some of the limitations of GDP as a measure of well-being and then discuss how the alternative indicators attempt to tackle these limitations. 1. WHY GDP IS NOT A MEASURE OF WELL-BEING GDP was never intended to measure welfare or well-being. As suggested in Box 21.1, GDP often rises with increases in things that most people would want to have less of, while it often fails to rise with positive contributions to individual and social well-being that are not bought and sold in markets. Even if increases in GDP contribute to increasing well-being, ceteris paribus, many other factors may be equally or more important in determining well-being levels. In fact, overall social well-being may be declining if GDP growth is accompanied by increasing inequality and environmental degradation. Thus, well-being is clearly multidimensional. If we rely only on GDP to measure wellbeing, we may obtain policy prescriptions that make the country worse off, rather than better off. BOX 21.1 THERE’S NO G-D-P IN “A BETTER ECONOMY” The United States is the largest economy in the world, ranked by total GDP. In terms of GDP per capita, it ranks high but falls below some other countries such as Luxembourg, Norway, Ireland, and Switzerland. But how significant is this measure? “Gross domestic product has become the most watched and most misinterpreted of all economic indicators. It’s a measure of economic activity—of money changing hands. Despite the mundane nature of this economic indicator, politicians fiercely compete with each other to see who can promise the fastest GDP growth. Government programs and investments in technology get the green light only when they are predicted to spur GDP growth. Economists, bankers, and businesspeople pop the champagne corks when they hear ‘good news’ about quarterly GDP numbers. And while the United States leads in GDP, it also leads in military spending, the number of people in prison, and the percentage of people who are obese. These other first-place finishes seem at odds with America’s position atop the GDP standings— that is, until you realize that spending on war, incarceration, and disease, as well as other “defensive expenditures,” all count toward GDP. The arithmetic of GDP doesn’t consider what the money is actually being spent on, and over time, we’ve been spending more and more money on remedial activities and calling this ‘progress’.” Alternative GDP indicators can be constructed that correct for these negative aspects of production, as well as taking into account positive factors such as a clean environment, household production, or volunteer work that contribute to well-being but are not included in GDP. Such indicators have drawn increasing interest from economists and policymakers in recent years. Sources: Dietz and O’Neill, 2013; IMF, 2017. Many important issues are not included adequately, if at all in GDP. In addition, some things that are included in GDP can be misleading or represent actively harmful activities. • • • • • • • A critical issue is household production, which is examined at more length later in this chapter. While standard accounting measures include the paid labor from such household activities as child care and gardening, these services are not counted when they are unpaid. Standard measures do not count the benefits of volunteer work, even though such work can contribute to social well-being as much as economic production does. Also, the free services provided by many nonprofit organizations (e.g., a homeless shelter funded by donations) go unaccounted, even if the workers in the organization are paid. Some significant services provided for free are not counted, even though they might increase well-being. This includes some free Internet services such as Wikipedia, Gmail or YouTube. While Wikipedia relies on unpaid volunteer work, Gmail and YouTube depend on income from advertising, which is counted as part of GDP, but this does not capture the full value of the services provided to users. Leisure is another important neglected factor. A rise in output might come about because people spend more time and effort on paid work. The resulting increase in measured output does not take into account the fact that overwork makes people more tired and stressed and takes away from time that they could use for enjoying other activities. But if people spend more time as leisure, increasing their wellbeing, this will not be reflected in GDP (except insofar as they spend money on leisure-related activities). Also inadequately reflected are issues around loss (or gain) of human and social capital formation. Social and political factors that may significantly affect well-being include the health and education levels of a country’s citizens, as well as political participation, government effectiveness (or lack thereof), and issues of trust, corruption, or other aspects of the economic and social culture. Another significant criticism of GDP, when used as a general measure of economic progress or success, is that interactions between the economy and the natural world are often ignored. GDP generally does not account for environmental degradation and resource depletion, while treating natural resources that do not go through the market (such as the water purification services provided by natural systems such as forests and wetlands) as having no monetary value. Some outputs merely compensate for, or defend against, harmful events that result, directly or indirectly, from the economic activity represented in GDP. Referred to as defensive expenditures, these show up as positive contributions to GDP but we do not account for the associated negative impacts. Consider, for example, an oil spill that results in massive clean-up efforts: The billions of dollars spent cleaning up after the 2011 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico turned up as positive additions to GDP, even while the environmental and human losses are mostly not reflected. When environmental issues are mostly invisible, there can be an appearance of economic growth even as the ecological basis for future economic health is being seriously undermined. defensive expenditures: money spent to counteract economic activities that have caused harm to human or environmental health • • • Products or production methods that reduce, rather than increase, well-being may show up as additions to GDP. Unhealthy foods and drugs and dangerous equipment, for example, may lower, not raise, overall well-being. Even if people are willing to pay for such goods and services, either individually (perhaps influenced by advertising) or through their governments (perhaps influenced by interest group lobbyists), such decisions might reflect poor information or bad judgment when looked at from the point of view of well-being. In terms of production methods, if people are miserable at their jobs, suffering boring, degrading, unpleasant, or harmful working conditions, their well-being is compromised. The divergence between output and well-being is especially obvious in cases where workers’ lives or health are threatened by their working conditions, even while their work results in a high volume of marketed goods and services. Another gap between GDP and well-being is financial debt. GDP counts consumption levels as rising even if the rise is financed by unsustainably large debt burdens, whether the debt is held by consumers or by governments. When debts are high enough to require painful changes in future consumption, not accounting for financial debt is similar to not accounting for unsustainable tolls exacted on the natural environment. Finally, increased economic activity in a given country is counted as an addition to GDP even if it increases inequality. Two countries with the same per-capita GDP may have a significantly different income distribution and, closely related, different levels of overall well-being. At an individual level, if someone making just $20,000 per year receives a raise of $1,000, this is counted as the same societal gain as it would be if that raise went to someone with an income of $100,000. Obviously, the additional income means much more for the individual well-being of the person with the lower salary. Although economists generally accept this concept (called the diminishing marginal utility of income), GDP counts income gains the same regardless of whether the person receiving the increase desperately needs the income or is already rich. The foregoing examples all indicate the dangers of pursuing policies geared only to raising GDP. A narrow national focus solely on increasing output may result in decreased leisure and less time for parenting, friendships, and community relations; it can increase levels of stress and mental illness, or raise economic inequality to a socially destructive level. For all these reasons, improvements are needed in the design of measures of national success and in defining and gathering the data needed for such measures. The next section describes some leading alternative measures. Discussion Questions 1. GDP can be characterized as a (rough) measure of the amount of “throughput” taking place in an economy—as measuring the level of activity whose purpose it is to turn renewable and nonrenewable resources (inputs) into new products (outputs). How does “throughput” relate to sustainable well-being? Is more “throughput” always a good thing? 2. In Chapter 15, we discussed how economies are based on natural, manufactured, social, and human capital. Only the value of manufactured capital (structures and equipment)—and recently, software—is estimated in the current national accounts. Can you think of ways that the stocks of natural, social, and human capital might be measured? What kind of information would be needed? 2. A BROADER VIEW OF NATIONAL INCOME ACCOUNTING A number of national and international initiatives have been taken to modify national accounts by additional official data on well-being. In the United States, efforts to improve social and environmental dimensions of macroeconomic measurement in the national accounts has slowed considerably due to funding cutbacks. Nevertheless, many private groups, subnational entities (such as states in the U.S.), and official statistical agencies in a number of other countries are making progress in developing better measures to address the social and environmental issues of the twenty-first century. One of the approaches to creating alternative indicators focuses on refining measures of national assets and production, supplementing the National Income and Products Account (NIPA) framework with information on resources and environmental impacts. Another approach involves developing separate indicators for the different aspects of well-being and using these additional measures in combination with GDP to get a better assessment of well-being. Other measures rely on creating wholly new indicators based on a composite index including a set of variables measuring different aspects of well-being. Examples of some of these indicators, along with their estimation and application, are presented in this section. 2.1 SATELLITE ACCOUNTS One approach to measuring well-being has been the development of satellite accounts, which are intended to supplement standard national income accounts by tracking data on well-being indicators, such as health, education, and other aspects of social and environmental well-being.1 For example, the United Kingdom maintains environmental accounts that track data on forested area, oil and gas reserves, waste generation, greenhouse gas emissions, and expenditures on environmental protection. satellite accounts: additional or parallel accounting systems that provide measures of social and environmental factors in physical terms, without necessarily including monetary valuation Satellite accounts can be viewed as a “dashboard” approach to national accounting. The dashboard on a car provides not only a speedometer but also a gas gauge, as well as indicators of temperature, battery level, and miles driven per gallon of fuel. The dashboard on an airplane contains even more indicators, and an economy is considerably more complex than an airplane. Proponents of this approach agree that GDP is a useful measure of national output for historical and international comparisons, but believe that GDP tells us only one of the things that we want to know about the economy. Some of the things that it does not tell us are important, and they deserve to have their own indicators. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) uses dollar-denominated satellite accounts to highlight certain existing components of GDP.2 Beginning in 1994 the BEA operated a satellite account that was designed to see how GDP would be different if research and development were counted as investment rather than spending. As noted in Chapter 20, this change was incorporated into the core GDP account beginning in 2013. In 1998, BEA introduced two other satellite accounts—Transportation, and Travel and Tourism—to estimate the contribution of each of these sectors to GDP. And in 2013, the Health Care account was added to highlight health-care spending classified by the diseases being treated (instead of the types of goods and services purchased such as doctor visits or drugs). More recently satellite accounts for Arts and Cultural Production and Outdoor Recreation have been added to the BEA accounts. These satellite accounts eliminate some of the obscurity in the aggregate GDP measure, by estimating the contributions of particular sectors to the national income. Future uses of satellite accounts in the BEA may start experimenting with changes such as valuing household labor or counting environmental damages as losses. In general, the BEA’s satellite accounts rely on monetary valuation and are readily comparable to GDP. Other countries use satellite accounts in which the unit of measurement is physical units such as tons of carbon dioxide emitted or numbers of children in poverty. Even where resources can be easily valued in dollars, data in physical units may be more meaningful. Consider that we could measure the economic value of mineral reserves by multiplying the quantity of reserves in physical units by the market price. But suppose that the market price increases considerably at the same time that reserves are drawn down. Although the economic value of reserves could increase, that information would fail to tell us that our physical reserves have declined. Moreover, it is often very difficult to convert variables to monetary units. How can we express changes in crime levels or health status in terms of dollar values? Such questions raise important methodological issues, such as whether the economic value of higher asthma rates includes only medical expenditures and lost productivity, or whether other quality-of-life factors need to be considered. Some people may raise ethical objections to attaching dollar values to variables such as traffic deaths or biodiversity. As we delve into additional categories that we might wish to have reported in national accounts, we may find ourselves straying into areas where measurement becomes more difficult. Thus, we can add a fourth question to our list above: should we include only variables that can be measured objectively (whether in money or other units), or should we also consider subjective data? In particular, should one or more of our “dashboard” indicators present the results from surveys that ask people about their well-being? We consider this possibility next. 2.2 MEASURING WELL-BEING Recognizing the limitations of GDP and the need to develop indicators that incorporate social and environmental factors, in 2008 French president Nicolas Sarkozy created the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. The commission, which included many distinguished social scientists, was headed by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, and coordinated by prominent French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi. In September 2009, the commission produced its nearly 300-page report. It concluded that it is necessary to shift from an emphasis on measuring economic production to measuring well-being. It also distinguished between current well-being and sustainability, recognizing that whether current well-being can be sustained depends upon the levels of capital (natural, physical, human, and social) passed on to future generations. The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission defined eight dimensions of well-being, including material living standards, health, education, work and personal activities, political voice, social connections, economic and physical security or insecurity, and the environment. Objective data can be collected that provide information on many of these dimensions, such as average life expectancy, literacy rates, and air pollution levels. But such data still do not tell us exactly how these factors relate to well-being. If the goal of economics is to promote well-being, you may wonder why economists do not try to measure it directly. Until recently, most economists believed that it was not possible to obtain quantitative data on something that is inherently subjective; we cannot hook up individuals to a machine and measure their well-being in unambiguous quantitative terms. But we can take a much more intuitive approach—we can simply ask people about their well-being. The subjective well-being (SWB) approach involves surveying individuals and asking them a question such as: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” Respondents then answer based on a scale from 1 (dissatisfied) to 10 (satisfied). Although this approach may seem unscientific, a large body of scientific research has emerged in recent decades that suggests that data on SWB provides meaningful information regarding social welfare levels and the factors that influence well-being. subjective well-being (SWB): a measure of welfare based on survey questions asking people about their own degree of life satisfaction A wide variety of efforts, such as the World Happiness Report from Columbia University’s Earth Institute,3 the Gallup World Poll, and the European Quality of Life Survey, have come up with remarkably consistent measures of “happiness” or “life satisfaction.” The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission concludes: Research has shown that it is possible to collect meaningful and reliable data on subjective as well as objective well-being. Quantitative measures of [SWB] hold the promise of delivering not just a good measure of quality of life per se, but also a better understanding of its determinants, reaching beyond people’s income and material conditions. Despite the persistence of many unresolved issues, these subjective measures provide important information about quality of life.4 The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission recommends using SWB data in conjunction with objective data on various well-being dimensions such as income levels and health outcomes to obtain a more comprehensive picture of welfare. Most relevant for our study of macroeconomics is how SWB results correlate with standard economic measures of national welfare such as GDP. We can ask two relevant questions about this relationship: 1. Are average SWB levels higher in countries with higher GDP per capita? 2. As GDP per capita increases in a particular country over time, do SWB levels rise? We discussed some findings from studies that look into these questions in Chapter 9. Most of the research suggests that higher income is associated with higher SWB, but at a decreasing rate . Here we examine this relationship further based on SWB data that have been collected for many developed and developing countries. Figure 21.1 plots average SWB against per-capita GDP, adjusted for differences in purchasing power, for 60 countries. In general, SWB is positively correlated with higher levels of GDP per capita, but the benefits of income gains decline at higher income levels, as shown by the curved trendline.5 However, SWB can be high in both rich and poor countries. In fact, the countries with the highest SWB levels are Mexico and Colombia, both middle-income countries. Figure 21.1 also shows that while SWB varies among richer countries, all developed countries have relatively high SWB. There are no countries above a percapita GDP of US$20,000 per year that have an average SWB below 6.0, and many poorer countries have an average SWB below 6.0. Thus, it appears from this graph that for at least some developing countries, increasing GDP could lead to higher SWB levels. But income gains in richer countries are associated with much smaller increases in SWB. Figure 21.1 Average Subjective Well-Being and GDP per Capita Sources: SWB from World Values Survey online data analysis, 2005–2008 survey wave; GDP from World Development Indicators online database. Note: The trendline is a statistically fitted line showing a “best fit” estimate of the relationship between the two variables on the graph, GDP per capita and SWB. The other way to analyze country-level SWB data is to consider how SWB changes as a country develops economically over time. The longest time series of SWB data comes from the United States, dating back to 1946. While real GDP per capita has increased by about a factor of three since 1946, average SWB levels have essentially remained constant. An analysis of country trends in SWB over the period 1981–2007 found that average SWB rose in 45 of 52 countries, with economic growth associated with greater SWB gains for low-income countries. India is an example of a country that has experienced significant gains in SWB levels as its economy has grown in recent decades.6 Based on both approaches to evaluating SWB, the results imply that as people are able to meet their basic needs, such as adequate nutrition and basic health care, their happiness generally increases. Beyond that, further income gains are associated with smaller increases in SWB or no increase at all (as shown by the flattening out of the trend line in Figure 21.1). One explanation for this might be that at higher income levels, people are more likely to judge their happiness relative to others. So even if everyone’s income increases by the same percentage, average happiness levels may be unchanged. Another possibility might be that consuming more goods and services is simply not making people any happier, or that the benefits of increased consumption are offset by negative factors such as increased congestion and stress. As the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission mentions, further work is needed to understand the relationship between SWB and other well-being measures. But the results so far suggest that SWB should be one of the indicators on our “dashboard” of well-being measures. 2.3 THE GENUINE PROGRESS INDICATOR (GPI) In 1989, economist Herman Daly and theologian John Cobb Jr. suggested an alternative measure to GDP that they called the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). This measure was later transformed into the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), one of the most ambitious attempts to date to design a replacement to GDP.7 The GPI is a monetary measure of economic well-being for a given population in a given year that adds many benefits and subtracts many costs that are not included in GDP. It is designed to differentiate …between economic activity that diminishes both natural and social capital and activity that enhances such capital…In particular, if GPI is stable or increasing in a given year the implication is that stocks of natural and social capital on which all goods and services flows depend will be at least as great for the next generation, while if GPI is falling it implies that the economic system is eroding those stocks and limiting the next generation’s prospects.8 Over time, the GPI measure has been modified to respond to theoretical critiques and to integrate new data sources and valuation methods. The most recent version of GPI (termed GPI 2.0) aims to provide a consistent and precise framework for measuring GPI.9 GPI 2.0 has three main components: market-based welfare, services from essential capital, and environmental and social costs. Market-Based Welfare The starting point of market-based welfare is personal consumption expenditures (PCE). Economic welfare is primarily based on households’ consumption levels; hence, business investments, government consumption and net exports are subtracted from GDP to get PCE. In the United States, about 70 percent of GDP consists of personal consumption. In calculating the GPI 2.0, PCE is relabeled as household budget expenditure (HBE) to broaden the term so as to encourage the use of alternatives to NIPA PCE data that may have more detailed data on consumption, and to recognize that a significant amount of PCE may not be welfare-increasing consumption. Components of HBE that have zero or negative contribution to the household’s current well-being are then subtracted from HBE. This includes defensive and “regrettable” expenditures including medical care, legal services, insurance, food and energy waste, household pollution abatement, security expenses, and other expenditures that may be necessary but do not add to overall well-being. Also, to keep the focus on current welfare, expenditures on household investments that may contribute to long-term sustainability are subtracted from HBE. Hence, spending on consumer durables, household maintenance, higher education, savings, retirement, and charitable giving are deducted (although current services from these investments are included). Next, an adjustment is made for income inequality to reflect the negative impact of inequality on well-being. And, finally, benefits from provision of public goods and services are added since the exclusion of government spending from PCE underestimates the actual value of household consumption. The resulting value after making these adjustments gives the total market-based welfare. Services from Essential Capital Unlike GDP, which mostly focuses on manufactured capital, GPI accounts for welfare benefits from services of human, social and natural capital. Services from human capital include benefits from higher education, knowledge and skills. Value of household and volunteer work, leisure time, and benefits from Internet services fall under social capital. Services from manufactured capital include gains from consumer durables, home improvement and infrastructure. All economically valuable functions of nature such as provision of food and medicine, pollination of crops, and benefits from lakes, rivers, forests, wetlands, deserts and other ecosystems constitute the services from natural capital. The gains from services provided by these capital resources are added to the total market-based welfare. Social and Environmental Costs Social and environmental costs include aspects of economic activity that have a negative effect on well-being. For instance, homelessness, underemployment, increasing crime rate, more time spent in traffic, and vehicle accidents all have an adverse impact on human well-being and are counted as social costs. Environmental costs include the depletion of natural capital such as the loss of wetlands, groundwater depletion, productivity losses due to soil erosion, as well as the increase in air pollutants, greenhouse gas emissions, and noise and water pollution. Social and environmental costs are subtracted from the total of market-based welfare and services from essential capital to get the final GPI measure. The adjustments made to household budget expenditure in order to arrive at the GPI for a recent year (2014) are shown in Table 21.1. Table 21.1 Genuine Progress Indicator ($2012 per capita), United States 2014 Indicator Market-based welfare Household budget expenditures (HBE) Defensive and regrettable expenditures Household investments Costs of income inequality Public provision of goods and services Total market based welfare Services from essential capital Services from human capital Services from social capital Value $25,529.42 - $3,966.90 - $7,278.06 - $3,121.57 + $7,025.23 $18,188.12 + $5,223.68 + $12,856.93 Services from built capital Services from protected natural capital Total services from essential capital Environmental and social costs Depletion of natural capital Costs of pollution Social costs of economic activity Total environmental and social costs GPI per capita total + $6,041.57 + $1,554.65 $25,676.65 - $6,495.60 - $3,714.65 - $5,195.44 $15,405.69 $28.459.09 Source: Talberth and Weisdorf, 2017. As we might expect, with all the adjustments outlined above, the GPI differs significantly from GDP in magnitude and trends. The largest positive adjustments to GPI come from the benefits of social capital, which include unpaid work and the value of leisure time and internet services. The largest deductions come from the depletion of natural capital. Over the long term, not only is per-capita GPI much lower than per-capita GDP, but its growth trajectory is different from that of GDP. As shown in Figure 21.2, while GDP per capita and GPI per capita both increased with economic growth from 1950 to about 1978, in recent decades GPI has flat-lined while GDP has continued to grow, indicating that environmental and social costs omitted from GDP have been increasing faster than the value of the omitted benefits. This trend appears to continue using GPI 2.0 for the years 2012-2014 (Figure 21.3). Relying on the GPI instead of GDP might suggest significantly different policy recommendations, focusing more on reducing environmental damage, preserving natural renewable energy resources, and redressing rising inequality. Figure 21.2 GPI vs. GDP per capita 1950-2004 Figure 21.3 GPI vs. GDP per capita 2012-2014 GPI estimates have been developed for countries other than the United States, including Australia, China, Germany, India, Japan, Italy and Brazil. The GPI has also been applied at the subnational level, not only in the United States but also in other countries such as China (Liaoning province), Italy (Tuscany) and Belgium (Flanders). For example, a 2009 analysis of the Auckland region in New Zealand showed that between 1990 and 2006 the GPI grew at nearly the same rate as the region’s GDP. Even in this case, environmental losses grew at a more rapid rate than the GPI—rising 27 percent during this period, while the GPI rose 18 percent. But the positive contributions to the GPI, in particular growth in personal consumption, were enough to more than offset the environmental losses.10 The states of Maryland and Vermont and the city of Baltimore also measure their GPI. In Maryland, while economic contributions to the GPI rose steadily over the period 1960-2010, the net social contributions increased only slightly, and the environmental costs more than doubled (based on the earlier variation of GPI). In Vermont, 2011 GPI per capita was 40 percent less than state GDP due to rising income inequality and a strong dependence on fossil fuels.11 According to a 2017 analysis of the Maryland GPI, “the GPI can help to show net societal benefits of policies such as investing in public transit, increasing the minimum wage and reducing greenhouse gases— giving policymakers and advocates additional ammunition for political battles over such issues,” but actual influence on policy was limited.12 2.4 THE BETTER LIFE INDEX (BLI) One of the challenges of using multiple indicators to evaluate well-being, as suggested by the dashboard approach, is that it is sometimes difficult to communicate the results. How do we assess overall well-being if the poverty rate falls by two percentage points, but the emission of greenhouse gases increases by 3 percent? On the other hand, summing up production, poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, and other aspects of the quality of life in one single index, as is done with the GPI measure, also poses problems: in order to be added up, monetary values need to be attached to each dimension. Yet it is extremely difficult to value health, inequality or ecological functions in dollar terms. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has thus tried a mixed approach.13 With its Better Life Index (BLI), it tries to combine a large number of dimensions, many of which cannot easily be valued in monetary terms, into one single indicator using different possible weights for each dimension. BLI is somewhat more ambitious than the GPI in attempting to include more variables that are not commonly used for national accounting, precisely because they are hard to measure. The 2015 BLI report argues that: …a better understanding of people’s well-being is central to developing better policies for better lives. Well-being is multidimensional, covering aspects of life ranging from civic engagement to housing, from household income to work-life balance, and from skills to health status. A thorough assessment of whether life is getting better requires a wide range of metrics, captured on a human scale, and able to reflect the diverse experiences of people.14 Better Life Index (BLI) an index developed by the OECD to measure national welfare using 11 well-being dimensions BLI considers well-being a function of the following 11 dimensions: 1. Income, Wealth, and Inequality: the main variables used for this dimension are disposable household income and net financial wealth.15 The BLI also considers the degree of inequality in income and wealth. 2. Jobs and Earnings: the main variables comprising this dimension are the unemployment rate, the long-term unemployment rate, and average earnings per employee. 3. Housing Conditions: sufficient housing is important to provide security, privacy, and stability. 4. Health Status: the BLI includes life expectancy and a subjective evaluation of one’s overall health status. 5. Work and Life Balance: the BLI measures the proportion of employees who work long (50 or more) hours per week, the time available for leisure and personal care, and the employment rate for women with school-age children. 6. Education and Skills: this is measured as the percentage of the adult (25–64-yearold) population that has a secondary-school degree, and uses standardized testing to measure students’ cognitive skills. 7. Social Connections: this dimension is measured by people’s responses to a standardized question asking whether they have friends or relatives on whom they can count in times of need. 8. Civic Engagement and Governance: this dimension is based on voter turnout data and a composite index that measures citizen input into policy-making. 9. Environmental Quality: the main variable used to measure environmental quality is air pollution levels, specifically levels of particulate matter. Secondary environmental variables include an estimate of the degree to which diseases are caused by environmental factors, people’s subjective satisfaction with their local environment, and access to green space. 10. Personal Security: this dimension focuses on threats to one’s safety. It is measured using homicide and assault rates. 11. Subjective Well-Being: this dimension measures people’s overall satisfaction with their lives, as well as reported negative feelings. The BLI is designed to produce an overall wellbeing index. The results for each dimension are standardized across countries, resulting in a score from 0 to 10. But how do we assign a weight to the various components? One approach would be simply to weigh each of the 11 dimensions equally. The BLI report makes no specific recommendations for weighting the different dimensions, but its website allows users to select their own weights for each of the dimensions (see www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org). The OECD collects user input and uses this information to gain a better understanding of the factors that are most important for measuring well-being. Based on input collected from over 100,000 users about their preferred weight for each dimension, the OCED 2015 report shows a considerable variation in the importance of the 11 well-being dimensions across regions. The highest ranked dimensions are education in Latin America, life satisfaction in North America, health, education and environment in Europe, safety in Asia-Pacific, and work-life balance in Australia.16 Figure 21.4: BLI for selected countries, 2015 100 90 80 70 Total BLI Score 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Norway Australia United States Germany France Japan Russia Housing Income Jobs Community Education Environment Governance Health Life Satisfaction Safety Work-Life Balance Mexico The BLI has been measured for 38 countries, including the OECD member countries, along with Brazil, South Africa, and Russia. Figure 21.4 shows the total BLI for eight countries. Among these countries, Norway and Australia show the greatest life satisfaction, scoring highly on employment levels, quality of jobs and health of the population. (Other Nordic nations along with Switzerland, New Zealand, and Canada have similar scores). Countries with low employment levels and low life expectancy have the lowest life satisfaction. The United States performs well in terms of household income, status of housing and sanitation, and long-term unemployment. It falls somewhere around the OECD average in terms of work-life balance, social connections, civic engagement, quality of working environment, literacy and cognitive skills, and exposure to pollution. But it ranks among the lowest in terms of inequality in income and health outcomes.17 The BLI provides a comprehensive view of the many factors that influence wellbeing. Income is not presented as a dominant feature but as one component of many. One of the criteria used to choose the BLI variables is policy relevance. Several of the dimensions, such as education, housing, and environmental quality, can be directly improved with effective policies, although the linkage between other dimensions (such as subjective well-being) and policies needs further study. 2.5 THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX (HDI) In contrast to the BLI, the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) is calculated based on only three components of well-being: life expectancy at birth, years of formal education, and real Gross National Income (GNI) per capita.18 Although these are denominated in different units, no attempt is made to translate one into the other. Rather, relative performance is presented in a scaled index (Figure 21.5). Human Development Index (HDI): a national accounting measure developed by the United Nations, based on three factors: GNI per capita level, education, and life expectancy Like the BLI, the HDI then faces the issue of how to assign relative weights. The standard HDI approach is to give equal weight to each of the three indicators. Although the GNI measure is modified to account for the principle, discussed above, that additional income is worth more to a person with lower income than to a person with higher income, the inclusion of standard measures of income as one-third of the indicator makes it highly, although not perfectly, correlated with GDP; of the 30 countries with the highest HDI scores in 2015, all but one was also ranked in the top 40 by national income per capita. At the same time, the results often show that countries with similar income levels measured by GNI per capita vary dramatically in overall human welfare, as measured by the HDI. For example, Jamaica, the Philippines, and Swaziland have similar levels of GNI per capita, but their HDI scores vary significantly. Jamaica has the highest score in this group with a relatively high life expectancy of about 76 years, compared to 68 years in the Philippines and 49 years in Swaziland. Education levels in Jamaica are also higher than those in the Philippines and Swaziland. Swaziland’s low life expectancy and lower average education levels pulls down its HDI score.