What is it about?
Attempts to create measures of national wellbeing and progress have a long history. In the UK, they go back at least as far as the 1790s, with Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland. More recently, worldwide interest has led to the creation of a number of indices seeking to go beyond familiar economic measures like GDP. In this paper we focus on the Measuring National Well-being development programme of the UK’s Office for National Statistics. We explore some of the challenges which need to be faced to bring wider measures into use. For example, it is important for measures beyond GDP to be adopted as policy drivers. We also ask how to challenge the continuing dominance of economic measures in business decisions and in everyday life, as well as in public policy. In particular, we note the increasing need to assess the sustainability of our current activities, including as a result of the impact they are having on the environment and the climate. Then there is the question of international comparability: we can add up GDP across, say, the EU and we can compare GDP growth between countries, but is this necessary for wider measures of national wellbeing? Finally, we cannot run before we can walk: there are still some issues to resolve in ensuring that the new measures of national wellbeing are soundly based and constructed using appropriate statistical methods.
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Why is it important?
The United Nations has published its agenda for progress towards a better world by 2030. This includes a commitment from all countries to develop broader measures of progress to complement the economic headline measure, gross domestic product (GDP). This paper points to one example of how such measures can be developed and used.
Perspectives
This is an issue that I care passionately about. In my early days as a member of the UK government statistical service I worked on the UK national accounts and can appreciate the importance of having sound and timely economic data. However, during the course of my career I also became aware of the limitations of GDP - for example that much unpaid work is simply ignored - and that wider measures, including social and environmental aspects, were also needed. So, it was with great pride that I worked as the first director of the UK's Measuring National Well-being programme. I have continued to research this topic since my retirement from the ONS in 2012, with the good fortune of being a visiting professor at Imperial College London and collaborating with Professor David J. Hand.
Prof Paul Allin
Imperial College London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: New statistics for old?-measuring the wellbeing of the UK, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society), November 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/rssa.12188.
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