Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MAKSWELL (MAKing Sustainable development and WELL-being frameworks work for policy analysis)

Teaser

During the last decades hundreds of initiatives have been developed all over the world in order to propose innovative frameworks able to move in “beyond GDP” perspective.Concepts as social indicators, basic needs, human development, sustainable development, quality of life...

Summary

During the last decades hundreds of initiatives have been developed all over the world in order to propose innovative frameworks able to move in “beyond GDP” perspective.
Concepts as social indicators, basic needs, human development, sustainable development, quality of life or societal progress have been at the centre of the debate for enhancing the use of economic, social and environmental indicators. Milestones of this debate have been the Human Development Reports and the so-called Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report. One of the major themes contained in it was to encourage the use of new well‐being metrics in policy decisions in order to move beyond identifying “problems” as well as to anchor well‐being metrics in the design, implementation and evaluation of public policies.
Within the European Statistical System different activities are currently ongoing at local, national and international level, as for example the report Quality of Life by Eurostat, OECD and JRC publications on regional well-being, or the annual report on Equitable and Sustainable Well-being in Italy (Bes) and its local declinations, the Measure of National Wellbeing in the UK.
At the same time several NSIs have started to publish SDG indicators as required for the implementation of the Agenda 2030 for the Sustainable Development, detailed into 17 Goals and 169 target regarding all the dimensions of human life and of our Planet. Although these experiences shared a common framework background, they are not completely integrated making it difficult to carry out comparisons and to read the information on a similar scale from local to national and European level. The statistical sources used may differ substantially. Still, these different initiatives are hardly linked with a policy agenda with very few exceptions.
In this context MAKSWELL project aims to extend and harmonise the indicators able to capture the main characteristics of the beyond-GDP approach proposing a new framework that includes them in the evaluation of the public policies. It aims at creating a shared knowledge on the state of the art on relevant dimensions of sustainable development and on vulnerabilities and potentialities of society; on traditional and new data collection tools and modern statistical methods for timely and accurate data.
This will be realized through the achievement of the following objectives:
- build up a database for a wide set of EU countries that selects and harmonizes the national framework on well-being as well as the available SDG indicators. A repository will be made openly accessible with web links to indicators and related information for each country;
- extend the existing well-being frameworks with new data sources (e.g. big data) and improve data availability on well-being using innovative methodologies, such as small area estimation and now-casting techniques;
- develop adequate statistical methodologies for measuring poverty and inequality at regional level and recommendations for transferring them to other areas;
- use the extended database for policy evaluation at macro level and build up two comprehensive pilot study for Italy and Hungary.

Work performed

From 1st November 2017 to 30th April 2019, several activities were implemented and the following results obtained:

- an analysis of the frameworks on well-being in the European countries was provided to check the availability of sub-national data and links between frameworks and policy making. A direct survey among the National Statistical Institutes of the 28 EU countries was conducted to update and complement the information. The analysis provides the description of three country initiatives (Sweden, France and Italy) selected as important for their high policy relevance.

- an inventory of what available at country level about the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals was produced, providing not only an up-to-date list of web links for each country but also an inventory of the domains covered (compared to those identified by OECD) with regards to wellbeing. The result provides a useful tool to identify data sources and indicators to be used in the research work related to the development of the methodologies.

- the overview of national experiences on the implementation of the SDGs was extended by making an inventory of all SDG indicators which are currently published, data sources used for publications, frequency, regional level, and potential alternative data sources for Italy, the Netherlands and Germany. The purpose is to illustrate how non-traditional data sources can be used for the production of SDG indicators as a primary data source or in combination with survey data. Additionally a list of examples how non-traditional data sources (scanner data, mobile phone network data, webscraping and social media platforms, satellite images, aerial images, and road sensor data) are used in the context of official statistics and in particular for measuring SDG indicators was provided.

- it was made an overview of methods to use big data sources in official statistics and measurement frameworks for well-being and sustainability indicators, analyzing two types of approaches: one is to combine survey data with big data in prediction models, where the big data sources are used as covariates to improve the precision for low regional estimates or the timeliness of the predictions of the first releases of official statistics; the other is to construct official statistics or indicators directly from big data sources and apply corrections to account for selection bias.

- it was presented a “reflection paper” containing some recommendations to the European Commission to be taken into account in the planning of the main themes of the next 9th Framework Programme. The document highlights the main challenges for official statistics such as to improve the measurement of complex and multidimensional phenomena, answer to new and more specific knowledge needs, provide foundation for evidence based policies and promoting the statistical culture.

- Several dissemination and communication activities were implemented such as the set-up and release of the website and brochure. Two out of the three mid-term workshops have been organised and successfully attended by a targeted audience (NSIs, academics, stakeholders, policy makers). MAKSWELL was presented at various national and international events.

Final results

As reported in Stiglitz et al. (2018, p. 103), well-being indicators could be used in the different stages of the policy cycle from identifying priorities for action, to assessing the pros and cons of different strategies to achieve policy goals, to allocate the resources (budgetary, human, political) needed to implement the selected strategy, to monitor interventions in real time as they are implemented, and to assess the results achieved and take decisions on how to change policies in the future.

All these steps requires a clear definition of the indicators that could be useful to measure the impact of the policy selected. This implies in turn new data and new metrics as pointed out recently also by Oecd.
MAKSWELL contributes on this goal along several dimensions. Particularly all the results achieved in terms of new data and new methodology will be tested on a national experience to derive a coherent framework of reliable evidence ready to be discussed with the community and to be exported and tested in other countries.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.makswell.eu/.