Measuring World Better Life Frontier: A Composite Indicator for OECD Better Life Index

The OECD Better Life initiative recently released a comprehensive set of 11 indicators of well-being covering a group of countries. Each individual indicator corresponds to a key topic that is essential to well-being. However, the problem of aggregating them is left to users of this dataset. Using these as individual indicators, we propose a composite indicator of overall well-being, which is intended to measure the performance of each country in terms of providing well-being to its people. The ‘benefit of the doubt’ approach (BOD), a well-known aggregation tool based on a weighed sum, assigns the most favourable weights for each entity under investigation. BOD may also be considered to evaluate the performance of each entity in terms of its efficiency. Regarding individual indicators as outputs, it constructs the benchmark production frontier from observed individual indicators. A composite indicator based on BOD equals the distance between each entity’s individual indicator and the production frontier, indicating its efficiency. It is widely considered that the well-being of a country’s people stems from its productive base, which is characterized by capital assets and social infrastructures. Thus, the productive base can be considered the input used to produce well-being, which is reflected by individual indicators. Therefore, when we apply BOD to aggregate individual well-being indicators across countries, we implicitly assume that all countries have the same productive base, as BOD addresses only the output and neglects the input. This inaccurate assumption leads to a distorted performance measure. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), in which BOD has its roots, is a tool to measure the efficiency of each entity by allowing for differences in inputs as well as outputs across entities. DEA also measures efficiency by using the distance to the production frontier; however, unlike BOD, DEA constructs the production frontier more accurately by utilizing the information of inputs as well as outputs, leading to a better performance measure. We apply DEA to aggregate 11 individual well-being indicators into a composite indicator using the World Bank’s estimates of each country’s productive base. The composite indicator based on BOD is distributed similarly to and is highly correlated with the existing Human Development Indicator (HDI). It is also positively correlated with GDP per capita. On the other hand, we show that the composite indicator based on DEA is negatively correlated with HDI as well as GDP per capita.     

Does Human Development Index Provide Rational Development Rankings? Evidence from Efficiency Rankings in Super Efficiency Model

The human development index (HDI) rankings have provided a referenced measure for people to choose a country in which to travel or live. This paper employs a superefficiency model to evaluate the rationality of the HDI rankings of 19 evaluated OECD countries in 2009. Compared to the HDI rankings, the efficiency rankings measured by the super-efficiency model have the following two advantages: (1) they consider the inputs that are used to generate the indicators for constructing the HDI, and decide the weights of inputs and outputs endogenously; (2) the input slacks measured by the super-efficiency model can evaluate whether the inputs are over-used and provide the improvement path of each country’s input variables. Empirical result shows that approximately 75 % of the evaluated countries had rather different results in the efficiency rankings and the HDI rankings. Additionally, the input slack shows that roughly 70 % of sample countries over-used their capital per labor relative to their existing outputs (or the HDI).     

The Cost of Well-Being

It is by now common knowledge that in switching from GDP to alternative, multidimensional, measures of collective well-being one can provide a better account of a country’s socio-economic conditions. Such a gain, however, comes at the price of losing output-to-input type of link between well-being and the resources necessary to make it available. Since well-being measures are not meant to be only an exercise in documentation, but also to inform policies and priorities, we propose a method to build a measure of well-being in the form of a single index, as for GDP, which takes into account: (1) the social and environmental costs, not considered in the GDP, and (2) the use of conventional resources (capital and labour), not considered in the currently available multidimensional measures of well-being. We use a Data Envelopment Analysis type of model, integrated with Principal Component Analysis, to evaluate OECD countries’ relative efficiency in providing well-being. Our results show that the costs of producing well-being have a large and significant impact on the resulting index of well-being. Therefore, high efficiency in providing well-being and high income cannot be considered a proxy to each other. In addition, it is shown that countries react differently to the different costs of well-being: poor countries are, on average, more efficient in terms of conventional inputs (labour and capital), while rich countries have higher efficiency indices relative to social and environmental costs. The close to zero correlation between GDP and well-being indices for rich countries provides new support to the “Easterlin paradox”.     

Has Livability of Japan Gotten Better for 1956–1990?: a Dea Approach

This paper presents an approach for time-series livability assessment using DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis), a mathematical programming technique for measuring the relative efficiency of DMUs (Decision Making Units) with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. Regarding each year as a separate DMU in DEA, and replacing the inputs and the outputs with negative and positive social indicators respectively, we evaluate Japan's livability for the period 1956–1990. Results of the analysis using eight social indicators identify 20 DEA livable years out of the 35 and find eight best-balanced years. It is concluded that DEA, which enables non-uniform, multi-dimensional and relative evaluation, can be a valuable analytic tool in quality-of-life research as well. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Does Good Governance Enhance Happiness: A Cross Nation Study

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the efficiency of the countries over the period of 10 years by applying data envelopment analysis (DEA). Based on rational and factual parameters such as freedom of press, freedom of religion, percentage of export in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), index of globalization, life expectancy at birth, gender ratio etc., this paper attempts to measure the efficiency of happiness. A combination of social and economic factors has been used to measure technical efficiency. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it measures the relative efficiency of all the countries included in the study. The nations have been ranked as per their relative efficiency and the peer group has been formed. Second a comparison between the rich and the poor countries have been done to test empirically whether the economic growth enhances the happiness among people. Presently, more than 3,000 studies have been published on happiness and Veenhoven in 2004 created a database called World Database of Happiness. The World Database of Happiness has attempted to present the available research findings on happiness. Part of the findings on happiness in nations is available in ‘States of nations’. For the research purpose, States of Nations and the data published by have been considered. Although happiness has been quantified and the existing literature has sufficient empirical evidences of the same, in the present context, the relative efficiency has been calculated for the countries on basis of objective and subjective happiness parameters. As per the literature, happiness has two aspects (1) objective and (2) subjective. Objective parameters are external to the individuals and covers material living parameters viz. GDP growth, income, nutrition, mortality rate, literacy etc. However, Subjective indicators measure the quality of life of the individuals. These are summarized as ‘‘subjective well-being’’. The various parameters considered in the study capture different aspects of happiness. The result shows how the government can increase the happiness of the people by analyzing the behavior and expectations. People express their preference explicitly about political parties, religion believes, law and order situation, trust in official institutions etc. Although, the behavior of people largely depends upon availability of goods and services in the market, the government can make budgets according to priority or preferences of people. Another way to increase happiness can be done by analyzing the peer group, which is an outcome of DEA. This shows the nations which are similar in terms of their economic and social conditions. The government can compare the prevailing conditions in different countries that improve the condition in their respective country. This could be an effective method as some of the parameters can be replicable in order to make people happier. The limitation of this study is lack of availability of data for many countries. As the number of countries increases, a change in the relative efficiency can be observed. Therefore, a future study can be conducted where the relevant data can be collected and a more global result can be obtained.     

Combining Achievement and Well-Being in the Assessment of Education Systems

Countries’ education systems are often compared using academic achievement measures from large-scale assessments like PISA. These exercises are criticized because achievement is but one of the aims of education and comparisons don’t take into account each country’s socio-demographic composition, cultural and historical background and organizational features. We use data from OECD countries to assess countries that can serve as models for education policy to promote both high mathematics achievement and student well-being. We adopt a novel methodological approach based on imputation methods to simultaneously estimate mathematics achievement and students’ sense of belonging while taking into account countries’ socio-demographic and organizational features. Results indicate that, in general, education systems have been able to organize and use their resources to promote either mathematics performance or student well-being, but not both simultaneously. The East Asian approach to education is successful in promoting student achievement in mathematics while Austria, Norway and Spain have greater success in promoting students’ sense of belonging.     

机构养老服务效率研究--以厦门市为例

以厦门市为研究对象,在文献回顾的基础上,选取4个投入变量和3个产出变量对该市28家养老机构进行数据包络分析（ DEA）,考察了机构养老服务的综合效率和规模效率情况,并运用Spearman等级相关分析和秩和检验,对养老服务效率与质量以及其他影响因素进行了筛查,通过拟合Tobit模型,发现养老机构的固定资产总值和是否隶属于医院等质量因素对机构养老服务效率产生负向影响。在此基础上,对我国的机构养老政策和发展方向提出意见和建议。     

Social and Economic Wellbeing in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin: Building an Enlarged Human Development Indicator

This paper calculates a human Wellbeing Composite Index (WCI) for 42 countries, belonging to the European Economic Space, North Africa and the Middle East, as an alternative to the shortcomings of other well-known measures of socio-economic development (i.e. Gross Domestic Product per head and Human Development Index). To attain this goal, different data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are used as an aggregation tool for seven selected socio-economic variables which correspond to the following wellbeing dimensions: income per capita, environmental burden of disease, income inequality, gender gap, education, life expectancy at birth and government effectiveness. The use of DEA allows avoiding the subjectivity that would be involved in the exogenous determination of weights for the variables included in WCI. The aim is to establish a complete ranking of all countries in the sample, using a three-step process, with the last step consisting in the use of a model that combines DEA and compromise programming, and permits to obtain a set of common weights for all countries in the analysis. The results highlight the distance that still separates Southern Mediterranean countries from the benchmark levels established by some European countries, and also point to the main weaknesses in individual countries’ performance. Nordic countries, plus Switzerland, top the list of best performers, while Mauritania, Libya and Syria appear at the bottom.     

Exploring Differences in Financial Literacy Across Countries: The Role of Individual Characteristics and Institutions

We explore microdata from the OECD/INFE survey on financial literacy of adult individuals. We find considerable differences in financial literacy across countries and decompose them into a part explainable by varying individual characteristics and a remainder. We show that individual characteristics matter with regard to differences in average financial literacy, but do not fully explain the gaps. We decompose financial literacy across its distribution and directly relate it to different policies. We then correlate the unexplained differences to institutional macroeconomic variables. We find strong correlations between unexplained differences and life expectancy, social contributions rate, PISA math scores, and internet usage, suggesting room for harmonization of environments across countries to close the financial literacy gap.

     

A multi-population evaluation of the Poisson common factor model for projecting mortality jointly for both sexes

Mortality forecasts are critically important inputs to the consideration of a range of demographically-related policy challenges facing governments in more developed countries. While methods for jointly forecasting mortality for sub-populations offer the advantage of avoiding undesirable divergence in the forecasts of related populations, little is known about whether they improve forecast accuracy. Using mortality data from ten populations, we evaluate the data fitting and forecast performance of the Poisson common factor model (PCFM) for projecting both sexes’ mortality jointly against the Poisson Lee–Carter model applied separately to each sex. We find that overall the PCFM generates the more desirable results. Firstly, the PCFM ensures that the projected male-to-female ratio of death rates at each age converges to a constant in the long run. Secondly, using out-of-sample analysis, we find that the PCFM provides more accurate projection of the sex ratios of death rates, with the advantage being greater for longer-term forecasts. Thus the PCFM offers a viable and sensible means for coherently forecasting the mortality of both sexes. There are also significant financial implications in allowing for the co-movement of mortality of females and males properly.     

Gender differences in relating life events and well-being in elderly individuals

Two hundred and sixty-eight community-residing elderly participants completed measures of physical illness, psychiatric symptomatology, life satisfaction, and recent mood, and a modified version of the Rahe (1975) Recent Life Change Questionnaire on which they indicated how much adjustment each event experienced required and whether it was appraised as expected or unexpected, desirable or undesirable, and controllable or uncontrollable. The results suggest that: (1) scores that reflect how events were appraised accounted for more variance than total frequency scores; (2) optimal predictors differed for different outcome measures; and (3) there are substantial gender differences in the pattern of relationships of predictor to outcome variables. The first two findings are consistent with those reported for younger cohorts. The third finding has not been reported previously.     

Energy, population and the environment: exploring Canada’s record on CO2 emissions and energy use relative to other OECD countries

Across the OECD, Canada??s record on CO₂ emissions is particularly poor, with overall emissions up 32% over the 1990?C2007 period. The current paper seeks to better understand this situation by making systematic comparisons of Canada with other OECD countries. For Canada overall, the rapid increase in emissions over the 1990?C2007 period can be explained by several factors, including major population growth, increased affluence (although to a lesser extent than elsewhere in the OECD), a continued dependence on fossil fuels, while continuing to increase its overall demand for energy. While the energy intensity of Canada??s economy has declined somewhat over recent years, it actually lagged behind most OECD countries on this front and remains one of the most energy intense economies in the world (2nd highest in the OECD on our indicator of energy intensity). While there are many factors responsible for this, Canada??s particularly energy-intensive industrial structure is certainly relevant, as is the importance of its primary sector relative to most developed nations.     

跨国人才外流与中国人力资本积累--基于出国留学的视角

人才的跨国外流,究竟是促进了本国的人力资本积累,还是导致了本国人力资本的净损失？回答该问题,对中国在开放经济条件下实施合理的人才开放政策以推动经济增长具有重要意义。本文在开放经济框架内,将人才外流引入人力资本积累的内生决定模型,从理论上探讨了人才外流与本国人力资本积累的关系。在理论分析的基础上,本文进一步使用世界上60个国家和地区2000－2010年的面板数据进行了计量估计。实证结果表明：人才外流与中低收入国家和地区的人力资本积累呈倒“U”型关系,但与高收入国家和地区的人力资本积累线性负相关;人才外流对本国人力资本积累的影响受到本国技能劳动占比和其所生产产品替代弹性的影响。进一步鼓励和合理引导人才尤其是高层次人才的国际流动对提升中国的人力资本水平意义重大。     

Business visits,knowledge diffusion and productivity

We investigate whether labor mobility can be a distinct source of growth by studying the productivity impact of business visits (BVs), vis-à-vis that of other well-known drivers of productivity enhancement. Our analysis uses an unbalanced panel—covering on average 16 sectors per year in ten countries during the period 1998–2011—which combines unique and novel data on BVs sourced from the US National Business Travel Association with Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data on R&D and capital formation. We find that mobility through BVs is an effective mechanism to improve productivity, being about half that obtained by investing in R&D. This relevant finding invites viewing short-term mobility as a strategic mechanism and prospective policy tool to overcome productivity slowdowns and foster economic growth.     

Oecd Social Indicators for 2001: a Critical Appraisal

The OECD social indicators for 2001 were critically reviewed by analysing their interrelationships across all OECD countries during the late 1990s. First, findings were provided covering the underlying structure of subsets of indicators by similarity in content as suggested by the OECD. Second, an analysis of the selected key indicators yielded five social dimensions, which were interpretedas conceptual constructs underlying the set of OECDsocial indicators at the level of the entire OECD area. Third, the relationships of each indicator withthese social dimensions were observed to aid choosing of appropriate indicators for making and evaluating social policies. Fourth, the OECDcountries were ranked according to their overall social welfare, as defined by the OECD social indicators, basedon the scores of the countries on the social dimensions. Fifth, similarities among the OECD countries were examined and it was found that the countries formed six bipolar country dimensions. The findings showed that an easily interpretable structure underlies the OECD social indicators. The paper clarified the use of the OECD social indicators for 2001 as a tool for planning and decision-making and for cross-national analyses of social policies.     

Vocational Status,Hukou and Housing Migrants in the New Century: Evidence from a Multi-city Study of Housing Inequality

In the 1960s and 1970s, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union experienced an unanticipated stagnation in the process of mortality reduction that was accelerating in the west. This was followed by even starker fluctuations and overall declines in life expectancy during the 1980s and 1990s. We identify statistically the extent to which, since the 1990s, the countries of the post-communist region have converged as a group towards other regional or cross-regional geopolitical blocks, or whether there are now multiple steady-states (‘convergence clubs’) emerging among these countries. We apply a complex convergence club methodology, including a recursive analysis, to data on 30 OECD countries (including 11 post-communist countries) drawn from the Human Mortality Database and spanning the period 1959–2010. We find that, rather than converging uniformly on western life expectancy levels, the post-communist countries have diverged into multiple clubs, with the lowest seemingly stuck in low-level equilibria, while the best performers (e.g. Czech Republic) show signs of catching-up with the leading OECD countries. As the post-communist period has progressed, the group of transition countries themselves has become more heterogeneous and it is noticeable that distinctive gender and age patterns have emerged. We are the first to employ an empirical convergence club methodology to help understand the complex long-run patterns of life expectancy within the post-communist region, one of very few papers to situate such an analysis in the context of the OECD countries, and one of relatively few to interpret the dynamics over the long-term.     

A Non-radial DEA Index for Peruvian Regional Competitiveness

In this paper, we propose a method to measure competitiveness performance at the subnational level, with an application to Peruvian regions. For this, we propose a benefit-of-the-doubt composite index that summarizes the information of several indicators that characterize competitiveness. It is based on an optimization approach, using data enveloping analysis (DEA) techniques, so that each indicator is weighted in an endogenous way, and each unit is evaluated in the most favourable light. Our proposed index is a non-radial variant of the typical DEA scores, which avoids the traditional pitfalls of DEA-based composite indices, such as unreasonable weights. Additionally, we propose a meta-frontier approach in order to compare the competitiveness performances across different periods of evaluation. Our assessments of the Peruvian regions’ competitiveness performance improve on the results of traditional DEA methods, which award high marks to regions with very heterogeneous performance (i.e., regions with very high scores in some indicators, and very poor in others). Additionally, the comparison of the performance across time shows a general decrease in the average competitiveness between 2008 and 2014 of the Peruvian regions.     

A trichotomic segmentation approach for estimating composite indicators

Composite indicators (CIs) are commonly used for benchmarking of countries over the years, summarizing in a single measurement, complex social, economic, environmental etc. concepts by involving several thematically related sub-indicators. When estimating  CIs and for a few specific countries, it is possible to have a strong indication and belief about their performance, prior to obtaining their scores. Based on that, a number of countries are likely to occupy the top-ranking positions; some will remain at the bottom list, while others may range in intermediate places. This initial preference information imposes a trichotomic segmentation that divides the countries under assessment into categories of superior, inferior and of ambiguous future performance. In this paper, we introduce the trichotomic segmentation as initial preference information to estimate the values of the CIs. We build on the popular Benefit of the Doubt (BoD) method with common weights and develop a two-goal linear programming model, that next to the evaluation of the common weights for the sub-indicators, estimates cut-off points for the CI values that distinguish the superior and inferior countries. The proposed model maintains the advantages of the common variable weighting and produces scores that induce better discrimination of the countries, having also a significant correlation with the original CI scores. The proposed methodology is applied to reassess the Digital Economy and the Society Index.

     

Anticipating digital futures: ruins,entanglements and the possibilities of shared technology making

ABSTRACT

Contrary to the corporate production of digital cities, shared technology making explores ways of innovation that are open to all, informed by diverse knowledges, and led by citizens. However, this exploration faces corporate translation of ethical and societal values for capital accumulation and concerns around the right to participate. Building on Tsing’s concept of ‘ruins’, this paper considers the anticipation of digital futures while the neoliberal ruination of shared technology making is in full swing. The paper examines the entanglements in hackathon rationalities and practices and demonstrates that the possibilities of shared technology making emerge from disrupting technocratic visions and repurposing corporate innovation resources and techniques. Drawing on the analysis, the paper argues that these entanglements are crucial to digital futures. They disclose in concrete ways how neoliberal co-optation can be disturbed and transformed. Equally importantly, they urge continuous explorations to assemble diverse practices and values for building momentum towards sustained processes of shaping desirable futures.