Documents social indicator 215 results

"This year's Benchmarking Working Europe focuses on whether the European Union is really on the path towards convergence.

Analysing the state of 'working Europe' with the aid of a multi-level and multi-dimensional set of indicators and thus assessing what current EU policies have achieved or have not achieved, the Benchmarking Working Europe 2018 demonstrates that, despite renewed economic growth in GDP terms, the proceeds of this growth are being unequally shared and structural problems in the areas of education, infrastructure and R&D remain due to the EU's obsession with labour market deregulation and fiscal austerity."

"How did Gross domestic product (GDP) become the world's most influential indicator? Why does it still remain the primary measure of societal progress despite being widely criticised for not considering well-being or sustainability? Why have the many beyond-GDP alternatives not managed to effectively challenge GDP's dominance? The success of GDP and the failure of beyond-GDP lies in their underlying communities. The macro-economic community emerged in the aftermath of the Great Depression and WWII. This community formalised their 'language' in the System of National Accounts (SNA) which provided the global terminology with which to communicate. On the other hand, beyond-GDP is a heterogeneous community which speaks in many dialects, accents and languages. Unless this changes, the 'beyond-GDP cottage industry' will never beat the 'GDP-multinational'. This book proposes a new roadmap to 2030, detailing how to create a multidisciplinary Wellbeing and Sustainability Science (WSS) with a common language, the System of Global and National Accounts (SGNA)."

"In February of 2008, amid the looming global financial crisis, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France asked Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, along with the distinguished French economist Jean Paul Fitoussi, to establish a commission of leading economists to study whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP)--the most widely used measure of economic activity--is a reliable indicator of economic and social progress. The Commission was given the further task of laying out an agenda for developing better measures.
Mismeasuring Our Lives is the result of this major intellectual effort, one with pressing relevance for anyone engaged in assessing how and whether our economy is serving the needs of our society. The authors offer a sweeping assessment of the limits of GDP as a measurement of the well-being of societies--considering, for example, how GDP overlooks economic inequality (with the result that most people can be worse off even though average income is increasing); and does not factor environmental impacts into economic decisions.
In place of GDP, Mismeasuring Our Lives introduces a bold new array of concepts, from sustainable measures of economic welfare, to measures of savings and wealth, to a "green GDP." At a time when policymakers worldwide are grappling with unprecedented global financial and environmental issues, here is an essential guide to measuring the things that matter."

"Purpose
Emerging technologies are addressing current challenges to shift from a linear to a circular economy. However, the consideration of social aspects in this context is limited, and the prioritization of indicators appears arbitrary in the absence of clear and robust selection criteria. Following social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) principles, the aim of this paper is to guide the selection and inventory of social indicators based on a case study on evolving flexible packaging within the European circular economy.
Methods
To achieve the objective, the study involves several steps, including conducting a systematic literature review to identify key stakeholders, impact subcategories, indicators, and inventories for circular flexible plastic packaging. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is applied to preselect a set of indicators, followed by stakeholder engagement in prioritizing impact indicators through participatory methods. Subsequently, a data collection procedure was established.
Results and discussion
This paper presents a materiality ranking for 19 social indicators tailored to the emerging circular flexible packaging. The result is a prioritization of nine of these indicators, including Existence of record of proof of age, Percentage of workers who are paid a living wage or above, and Existence of certified environmental management system. These nine indicators form the basis for the collection of respective inventory data for an entry-level assessment. Furthermore, guidelines on 11 procedural steps were formulated based on these findings. Moreover, challenges of synonymity and inconsistency in S-LCA terminology, besides inaccessible inventory data especially in the context of evolving recycling technologies, are identified as substantial barriers in the effort to streamline and perform S-LCA.
Conclusions
The paper concludes that prioritizing indicators is essential for entry-level and prospective assessments, especially when time and data are limited. Additionally, using primary inventory data to evaluate the foreground system and its direct impacts on stakeholders promotes accountability and corporate social responsibility. Furthermore, a set of procedural steps, from defining the system boundary to preparing the data questionnaire, serves as a valuable resource for practitioners across diverse industries."

"In the ten years since the OECD published its 2013 Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being, the inclusion of evaluative, affective and eudaimonic indicators in national measurement frameworks and household surveys has grown. Country practice has converged around a standard measure of life satisfaction, however affective and eudaimonic measures remain less harmonised. This working paper combines findings from a stock take of OECD member state uptake of Guidelines recommendations with advances in the academic evidence base to highlight three focal areas for future work. Looking ahead, the OECD should prioritise (i) revisiting recommendations on affective indicators, particularly in light of recent OECD recommendations on measuring mental health; (ii) reviewing progress towards operationalising measures of eudaimonia; and (iii) creating new extended modules to measure the subjective well-being of children, to deepen advice on domain-specific life evaluation measures, and to further develop more globally inclusive measures, drawing on (for example) concepts of subjective well-being developed in Indigenous contexts and beyond western European/North American research literatures."

"Previous Eurofound research developed three complementary tools to examine the dynamics of industrial relations and compare how national industrial relations systems are faring in terms of quality and change over time. These tools are a dashboard of indicators; an index to measure country performance in industrial relations as a whole, four key dimensions and subdimensions; and a typology of industrial relations systems based on performance in industrial democracy and relevant characteristics of industrial relations systems. This report builds on this previous research and has three main objectives: to revisit and update the index of each of the four key dimensions for 2018–2021 based on new data and indicators; to analyse convergence trends in the key dimension industrial democracy from 2008 to 2021 across national industrial relations systems; and to update the typology of industrial relations systems to contribute to the cross-country analysis of relevant patterns of change from 2008 to 2021, particularly in relation to collective bargaining."

"Thanks to the large investment of official data producers in OECD countries, measures of subjective well-being have become increasingly robust and meaningful from a policy perspective. In the ten years since the OECD published its Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being, the inclusion of subjective well-being indicators in national measurement frameworks and household surveys has grown. Country practice has converged around a standard measure of life satisfaction, however affective and eudaimonic measures of subjective well-being remain less harmonised. This policy insights, along with its accompanying working paper, identify priority areas for future OECD work by marrying the practical concerns of data collectors with good practice as identified by the academic literature."

"Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden verbreitete Einwendungen gegen das Konzept relativer Einkommensarmut aufgegriffen und vor dem Hintergrund historisch-räumlicher Kontexte von statistischen Messkonzepten diskutiert. Eine grundsätzliche Kritik bezieht sich auf die Abstraktion vom Wohlstandsniveau. Sie ist allerdings nicht methodisch ausgerichtet, sondern richtet sich gegen die Fragestellung nach Armut im Sinne von Ausgrenzung und ist somit normativ begründet. Ausgangspunkt sind Vorstellungen von absoluter Armut, die nicht konkretisiert werden, während das Konzept relativer Einkommensarmut an Standards, aber auch Anforderungen in entwickelten Gesellschaften anknüpft. Weitere Kritik richtet sich konkret gegen die Indikatoren und bezieht sich meist auf Ungenauigkeiten infolge von eindimensionalen Messungen. Die damit verbundene Problematik wird aber meist einseitig dargestellt. Denn Unschärfen gehen in zwei Richtungen und kompensieren sich tendenziell. Die unausgewogene Fokussierung auf nur eine Seite ist also irreführend. Demgegenüber sind einige Einwendungen gegen konkrete Setzungen, die in die gängige Armutsmessung einfließen, durchaus berechtigt."

"Opportunities for social participation in Europe are unevenly distributed. However, how much need is there for socio-political reform in the individual EU member states actually? Will the reforms already undertaken suffice to level the playing field on social issues? While there is a fairly clear picture of the state-of-play for social inclusion in the EU member states, that is one question which remains unanswered.

To cast light upon it, the Bertelsmann Stiftung developed a Reform Barometer in cooperation with the European Bureau for Policy Consulting and Social Research Vienna (Prof. Bernd Marin) and the University of St. Gallen (Prof. Christian Keuschnigg). The Reform Barometer is based on a Europe-wide expert survey, in which 1058 social scientists from across the EU took part. These experts were asked to assess the need for reform during the period from July 2014 to January 2016 from five different angles which relate to social justice (poverty prevention, equitable education, labour market access, social cohesion and non-discrimination and health), as well as to provide details on reform activity of national governments and its expected impact. The results make it possible to compare reform policy both across the five policy dimensions and between countries: so for example, they have shown that some Eastern European countries not only took more action than the average to improve social inclusion, but also received good marks from the experts for the quality of their reforms."