1. Georgiana Ivan Eurostat, European Commission
10th Conference on Social Monitoring and Reporting Villa Vigoni, October The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
Georgiana Ivan Eurostat, European Commission
Eurostat

2. European context of measuring Quality of Life Indicators
Consistency with theory
The Triangle for Quality of Indicators (QoL)
SSF Report
Europe 2020
GDP & Beyond
Political relevance
Measurability
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe”
Eurostat

3. The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (2009)
Coordinated by J. Stiglitz, A. Sen and J.P. Fitoussi
Stressing the need of using other measures to complement GDP when measuring the progress of societies
Grouped into three areas: emphasizing the (1) household perspective, (2) environmental and (3) quality of life indicators
Better distributional measures for complementing central tendencies
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

4. GDP and beyond: additional actions and indicators
Commission roadmap for actions in the short/medium term =
GDP and beyond
EC Communication
Aug 2009
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

5. Priorities set out in the European Roadmap 2009
Complementing GDP with environmental and social indicators:
A comprehensive environmental index;
Quality of life and well-being indicators.
Near real time information for decision-making:
More timely environmental indicators;
More timely social indicators. (precise actions for EU-SILC)
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

6. The ESS response
Stiglitz Report
Sponsorship Group (SpG) launched by the European Statistical System (ESS) - February 2010
SpG report adopted by ESS - November 2011
Expert Group on Quality of life indicators- first meeting June 2012
Europe 2020
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

7. Expert Group on Quality of life indicators
- Participants: 10 MS (voluntary basis), OECD, Eurofound, scientific experts
- 7 meetings so far
- Made proposals for
dimensions, topics, indicators, variables
data sources to be used, way of dissemination
public consultations took place in some of the MS
- The Directors of social statistics agreed in 2013 on
a first set of QoL indicators on Eurostat's website
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

8. Expert Group on Quality of life indicators Guiding principles
Relevance of the indicator in relation to quality of life
Data coverage
Data availability
Data availability at a non-aggregated level
Possibility of showing information on the whole distribution
Reducing the complexity (by building synthetic indicators)
Overall consistency of the set
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

9. EU Quality of life framework
Overall experience
of life
Material living conditions
Environment
Governance
Jobs
Safety
Health
Social relations& leisure
Education
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

10. EU Quality of life data
- EU Statistics on Income & Living Conditions (EU-SILC) are the core instrument
- It is a micro data set covering most dimensions
- Complement the coverage of the dimensions with additional data sources (EHIS, LFS, TUS…)
- Objective + subjective data (collected for the first time in 2013)
- Distributional measures (geographical, vulnerable groups)
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"

11. Main outputs of Eurostat's QoL work
Set of QoL indicators on Eurostat's website (dedicated section)
- Datasets on subjective well-being containing average values (by country and for different groups) and distributional aspects (% with high, medium and low well-being)
- "Quality of life. Facts and views" publication (One article per QoL dimension)
- Same content in Statistics explained wiki pages available on Eurostat's website& Interactive infographic tool
Main value added: joint analysis of objective and subjective data for each dimension
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework

12. Interactive infographic
For you to judge...On this graph we plotted log of GDP per capita in PPS on X and average life satisfaction on Y.
The thing that I struggle with is for instance the satisfaction levels in Poland and the UK. The satisfactions levels are the same but for significantly different GDP levels. I really wonder why the immigration flows are directed the way they are...
(SC) So from this chart I see that we could identify which countries have the highest level of life satisfaction, and which have the lowest. Do you have any charts which show how countries rank in terms of their life satisfaction?
(AL): We knew you are going to ask us this…That’s what usually the media wants to know. Journalists love rankings. The matter is more complex than a simple ranking. We have tried to show that there are many elements to be considered at the same time. But ok, here is the graph everybody is waiting for…
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

13. 10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Future steps
Regular production by the ESS (Overall life satisfaction to be included in the core of EU-SILC)
Continuous quality improvements
In-depth analysis of the collected data (e.g. :multi-causality)
Micro data available for researchers; studies will follow
Use by the policy makers
And a module on QoL will be collected on a 6 yearly basis
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"

14. What matters most for our quality of life?
All in all, it looks like 44% of you were right….Having a bad health is more damaging to life satisfaction than having a low income. But income is important as well, those who are the poorest 20% in their countries are on average 1.4 less satisfied than the richest 20%.
EU-SILC 2013
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

15. What matters most for one's quality of life?
Average life satisfaction
by social support (ability to get help when needed)
Average life satisfaction by household type
Well, the 30% of you who mentioned social relations as the most important determinant of well-being had a point; Europeans who don’t have someone to rely on in case of help are much less satisfied with their life than those who do. The difference is 1.6 points, bigger than that between the poorest and the richest 20%. Fortunately, the percentage of people in this situation is rather small. We all know love is important as well, but we don’t measure it in our survey... As a sort of proxy, we can see that in terms of household type, living in a 2 adult household (in most cases nuclear families) it is associated with higher life satisfaction, and so does having children.
Yes No
EU-SILC 2013
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

16. What matters most for one's quality of life?
Average life satisfaction by employment status
Average life satisfaction by bad working conditions
(employed population)
And of course, the very few of you (6%) choosing the job as being the most important were sort of right as well. Being employed is associated with a higher life satisfaction on average, especially compared to the unemployed, but also to the inactive (except students). The quality of the job is definitely important, bad working conditions reduce life satisfaction to a level generally lower than, let’s say, a person in charge of domestic duties or other types of inactive. But not lower than that of a person who is unemployed.
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

17. Conclusions
Eurostat's work in the area is the response of the European statistical community to the societal (reflected in the political) norm of "going beyond GDP"
Relatively top-down approach, that included some elements of bottom-up coming from the Member States participating (national consultations)
Major achievements regarding the inclusion of subjective elements in official statistics, that can be analysed jointly with the objective ones
Joint analysis is essential, as individual answers are also impacted by norms and beliefs
The process of establishing Eurostat's Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe"
Eurostat

18. Thank you for your attention! Questions? Comments? Suggestions?
The process of establishing Eurostat's
Quality of life framework
10th Conference “Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe
Eurostat