1. Insights from the Your Better Life Index Romina Boarini OECD Statistics Directorate Exploring and exploiting quality of life complexity (QoLexity): epistemological, methodological and statistical issues Florence, 9-10 September 2011

2. BACKGROUND

3. OECD Work on Measuring Progress OECD has carried out work on Measuring Progress for nearly 10 years (GP, World Forums, etc); it remains among the key priorities for 2011-2012 Current political context: MP at the forefront of the international and national statistical agenda OECD 50 th anniversary: the OECD Better Life Initiative

4. OECD Better Life Initiative Are we measuring the right things? What matters most in PEOPLE’s life? Better Life Initiative How’s Life Compendium of well-being indicators Your Better Life Index Better policies for better lives

5. The Framework

6. Focus Households and people, not just the economy Assessing inequalities besides average levels Based on outcomes, not inputs or outputs Includes both objective and subjective aspects of well-being

7. Criteria for selecting 11 well-being dimensions Consolidated approach based on : –Conceptual work (Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi recommendations, previous OECD work, other established research on well-being) –Examination of national and other international initiatives –Internal consultation within OECD

8. Criteria for choosing indicators  Relevance with respect to the target concept - face-validity -easily understood, unambiguous interpretation -amenable to policy changes -possibility of disaggregation by population groups  Quality of supporting data -official and well-established sources -comparable/standardized definitions -maximum country-coverage -recurrent data collection 8

9. Your Better Life Index An interactive tool to compare countries according to the things that matter to YOUR life It covers 34 countries and 11 dimensions of well-being It is a gateway to OECD work

10. Your Better Life Index

11. STRESS-TESTING YOUR BLI

12. Robustness tests All the main assumptions behind the index have been tested (or are being): – Normalisation –Imputation –Inclusion of indicators –Aggregation technique –Weights “ Designing your BLI: methodology and selected results”, Boarini R., G. Cohen, V. Denis and N. Ruiz, (2011, forthcoming)

13. Weights: theory… Results of the index with 5000 RANDOM DRAWS on the weights

14. Rank robustness to weights Estimating the probability that countries are ranked in a given way

15. ….and reality

16. REFINING YOUR BLI

17. No gender/country patterns visible in users weights

18. But age seems to matter

19. An evolutionary tool Improved indicators as research results become available Will include inequalities in achievements between people with different characteristics Will include more countries, notably BRICS

20. Adjusting well-being achievements by deprivation

21. The index varies with the intensity of the aversion to deprivation α, aversion to deprivation Better Life Index (deprivation-adjusted score)

22. Conclusions 1.More work to improve the BLI 2.Move in line with the underlying statistical agenda 3.Is weighting an issue at all?

23. Robustness test to imputation

24. Robustness test to normalisation