1887

OECD Statistics Working Papers

The OECD Statistics Working Paper Series - managed by the OECD Statistics and Data Directorate – is designed to make available in a timely fashion and to a wider readership selected studies prepared by staff in the Secretariat or by outside consultants working on OECD projects. The papers included are of a technical, methodological or statistical policy nature and relate to statistical work relevant to the organisation. The Working Papers are generally available only in their original language - English or French - with a summary in the other.

Joint Working Papers:

Testing the evidence, how good are public sector responsiveness measures and how to improve them? (with OECD Public Governance Directorate)

Measuring Well-being and Progress in Countries at Different Stages of Development: Towards a More Universal Conceptual Framework (with OECD Development Centre)

Measuring and Assessing Job Quality: The OECD Job Quality Framework (with OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs)

Forecasting GDP during and after the Great Recession: A contest between small-scale bridge and large-scale dynamic factor models (with OECD Economics Directorate)

Decoupling of wages from productivity: Macro-level facts (with OECD Economics Directorate)

Which policies increase value for money in health care? (with OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs)

Compiling mineral and energy resource accounts according to the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) 2012 (with OECD Environment Directorate)

English

Multi-dimensional Living Standards

A Welfare Measure Based on Preferences

We compute a distribution-adjusted welfare measure that aggregates outcomes in three dimensions of well-being, namely income, employment and longevity. Aggregation weights reflect preferences of people on these dimensions. The welfare measure is calculated for 26 OECD countries and selected emerging economies, and covers about three decades. Relying on a single theoretical model of a hypothetical representative agent, we combine life satisfaction regressions to capture the full welfare losses of unemployment with a calibration approach to capture the value of longevity. We test for robustness of results over a series of datasets and specifications and find that the resulting estimated shadow prices of (one percentage point of) unemployment and one year of longevity average 2% and 6% of income respectively. While we assume an identical utility function for all individuals, shadow prices of unemployment and longevity vary both across countries and within countries across income groups. We find that economic growth differs significantly from the growth of our welfare measure. The latter grew faster than GDP thanks to the gains that countries experienced on longevity, but was also more volatile due to changes in unemployment. Rising income inequality exerts a negative effect on our welfare measure. Gains in longevity have almost the same impact on welfare as income growth, while the long-term impact of employment was smaller.

English

Keywords: welfare, measurement, living standards, well-being
JEL: I18: Health, Education, and Welfare / Health / Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health; J17: Labor and Demographic Economics / Demographic Economics / Value of Life; Forgone Income; J18: Labor and Demographic Economics / Demographic Economics / Demographic Economics: Public Policy; I38: Health, Education, and Welfare / Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty / Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty: Government Policy; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs; I32: Health, Education, and Welfare / Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty / Measurement and Analysis of Poverty; I31: Health, Education, and Welfare / Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty / General Welfare; Well-Being
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error