Angus Deaton, Princeton University

Successes  Here in the World Bank, I should say something about the 2005 round of the ICP  One great success  Extensions of content  Implementing a broad welfare agenda  Health as well as wealth  Well-being seen more broadly  Talk about achievements in comparability  Extensions in availability  Another Bank success

2005 Round of the ICP  For academics, internationally comparable accounts are among the most important of all development data sets  World Development Indicators  Penn World Table  ICP 2005 huge improvement over ICP 1993  Central control, general management of WB  Integrated global system  1993 round had lost credibility: uncoordinated regions  Changed our view of the world

Broadening scope  Development is about broad based improvement  Income is important  So are other parts of well-being  Health, education, life evaluation, emotional well- being, mental health  Major improvements in measurement, availability, and comparability of such data world wide  Empirical implementation of the Sen agenda  Deprivation and well-being in broad spaces

Examples  System of Demographic and Health Surveys  Recently a major tool for health assessment in poverty, deprivation, and health  Major source for infant and child mortality  In countries without complete vital statistics  Most of the poor countries in the world  Also weighs and measures children (and increasingly) adults  Documentation of malnourishment around the world  All of this is on a naturally comparable basis  One of my favorite examples: height of women..

Log of real GDP per head in year of birth Average height South Asia Africa Latin America & Caribbean Europe US China Central Asia 6

Other important examples  DHS is only one example  And researchers have a lot of catching up to do  Many others  WHO World Health Surveys  UNICEF MICS Surveys  These like DHS easily available and downloadable  Many more income and expenditure household surveys exist and many more available  World Bank leadership of International Household Survey Network  Helping to standardize, store, disseminate  Technical support for metadata & standardization

Database for development  World Development Indicators, with many millions of subscribers worldwide  Open Data Initiative  WDI is new openly available on line  Anyone in the world with access to the internet can instantly access these data  Takes us beyond academics (who were OK) to governments, NGOs, journalists, around the world  Includes other Bank data, projects, and data tools  Exactly the sort of global public goods that the World Bank should be providing  Likely to greatly expand and improve development discourse, nationally and internationally

Private sector too  Gallup World Poll aim is to sample all the population of the world  Since 2006, run identical surveys in 155 countries  National samples of 1,000 or so in each country  Most countries surveyed in most years  Many hard to survey countries, e.g. Myanmar, China, Cuba, 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa  Collects detailed data on self-reported well-being  Emotional experience as well as life-evaluation  Demographics  Income (much better than one might think)  These data fill an important gap in the world  But they are proprietary and a Gallup commercial asset

Outstanding tasks  Mortality data are seriously incomplete  Especially in the poorest countries, especially for adults  “imputing” data from best sources is useful, but not a substitute  WHO world mortality database is a great resources (under- used) but not useful for the countries where it is most needed  Household survey data  Used to be the leaders, now lagging  Major inconsistencies (e.g. rate of growth) with NAS  LSMS project did many important things, but never could produce internationally comparable surveys (like DHS for example)  The next big priority

More outstanding  National accounts  Very weak in many poor countries  Very weak in some not-so poor, rapidly growing countries  I have argued that growth transitions put special strains on old systems, including possible overstatement of GDP growth rates, for example.  SNA may assure comparability, but adherence to SNA is variable from one country to another  Reconciliation with household surveys has to be open to revision of NAS  Politically difficult to revise down fast growth rates

Improving national accounts  For ICP, technical assistance to improve national accounts is now seen as central  With more regular ICP, large revisions are going to be harder to defend  Sarkozy Commission challenges  To many currently existing treatments in GDP  More dialog between economists & NA statisticians  To develop better “green” accounting  To develop measures of self-reported well-being  Ready to move from academia to statistical offices  US example: well-being module in ATUS about to be released

Thank you!  Especially for inviting a user to participate in these discussions today