Measurements

This surge in urban populations, fueled more by natural increase than the migration of people from the countryside, is unstoppable, said George Martin, author of UN Population Fund recent report, “State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth.”

Cities will edge out rural areas in more than sheer numbers of people. Poverty is now increasing more rapidly in urban areas as well, and governments need to plan for where the poor will live rather than leaving them to settle illegally in shanties without sewage and other services, the United Nations says.

The first great wave of urbanization unfurled over two centuries, from 1750 to 1950, in Europe and North America, with urban populations rising from 15 million to 423 million.

The second wave is happening now in the developing world. The number of people living in urban areas will have grown from 309 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2030. By 2030, the developing world will have 80 percent of the world’s urban population.

Half the world soon to be in cities, New York Times, 27 June






In the early 2000s, Osberg and Sharpe (2002, 2005) developed a new composite
measure of well-being called the Index of Economic Well-being (IEWB). The salient
feature of this index was that it organized the economic well-being domain into four
dimensions: consumption flows, stocks of wealth, equality, and economic security.

Since then, we have greatly advanced our research program on the measurement
of economic well-being, both conceptually and empirically. The objective of further study is to measure progress that we have made on methodological issues associated with the construction of the index, in particular the adoption of a linear scaling procedure.

The advantages and disadvantages of this technique are discussed. Also new estimates of the Index of Economic Well-being and its domains and components for selected OECD
countries for the 1980-2005 period and discusses the factors behind these trends.

The main findings are that that the Index of Economic Well-being advanced at rates between 0.49 and 1.56 per cent per year between 1980 and 2005 for the selected
OECD countries, generally below the growth rates of GDP per capita. The consumption
flows and stocks of wealth domains of the Index experienced solid advances over the
period, but these developments were offset somewhat by falls in economic equality and
in economic security. Increased income inequality accounted for the fall in economic
equality while the rise in the private health expenditures, as a share of personal
disposable income, accounted for much of the decline in economic security.

References
Osberg, Lars and Andrew Sharpe (2002) “An Index of Economic Well-being for OECD
Countries,” Review of Income and Wealth, Series 48, Number 3, September, pp. 291-316.
Osberg, Lars and Andrew Sharpe (2005) “How Should We Measure the “Economic”
Aspects of Well-being?” Review of Income and Wealth, Series 51, Number 2, June, pp.
311-336.
Contact: Andrew Sharpe
Executive Director
Centre for the Study of living Standards
500-111 Sparks Street
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1P 5B5
613-233-8891, www.csls.ca




Measuring Progress

The dominant view among measurers of progress is that the rate of GDP growth is not
enough. Even the Economist now acknowledges this. There is increasing interest in
measures of happiness – or subjective wellbeing – as complementary indicators of
progress. However, population happiness measures are relatively stable over time
(reflecting the importance of adaptation and social comparison) and still do not tell the full story about national progress – or the lack of it.
There are other indicators that show that current approaches to progress not only fail to deliver improvements in quality of life, but are reducing it

The pervasive and complex impacts of social changes can be illustrated with individualism. The sociological literature here is itself ambivalent, noting that the freedom people now have is both exhilarating and disturbing, and that with freedom come both new opportunities for personal experience and growth and the anxiety of social dislocation.

However, it is fair to say that research is increasingly pointing to the costs of
individualism, which relate to a loss of both social support and personal control.

These costs include:
• a heightened sense of risk, uncertainty and insecurity;
• a lack of clear frames of reference;
• a rise in personal expectations, coupled with a perception that the onus of success
lies with the individual, despite the continuing importance of social disadvantage
and privilege;
• a surfeit or excess of freedom and choice, which is experienced as a threat or
tyranny;
• increased self-esteem, but of a contingent or narcissistic form that requires
constant external validation and affirmation;
• the confusion of autonomy with independence.

It is important to improve our understanding of this situation. If young people's wellbeing has indeed deteriorated, then this substantially weakens the case for continuing on our present path of social development, a central tenet of which is that health is continuing to improve.

It reinforces the need for a shift from material progress, which focuses on economic
growth and material welfare, to a new model of progress, sustainable development, which does not accord economic growth overriding priority, but, instead, seeks a better balance and integration of social, environmental and economic goals and objectives to produce a high, equitable and enduring quality of life.



Source:

Eckersley, R., Measuring progress: beyond wealth and beyond happiness,
OECD Forum on measuring and fostering the progress of societies. İstanbul, (27 June 2007),