A Stock-Take of Green National Accounting Initiatives

Green national accounting has existed in a variety of forms for just over thirty years. Having essentially begun as environmental cost adjustments to Gross Domestic Product, green national accounting now includes such indicators as the Genuine Progress Indicator, Genuine Savings, and the Ecological Footprint. This paper serves as an overview or stock-take of green national accounting initiatives and as a means of assessing the major developments since the early 1970s. It is concluded that a suite of indicators is required to convey a complete picture of a nation’s sustainable development performance. In addition, economic indicators need to be supplemented by biophysical indicators, although the latter should never be incorporated directly into national income accounts since they serve as indicators of ecological sustainability, not of economic performance. Finally, the fact that a number of recently established indicators are still in the embryonic stage of development means that considerable refinement is necessary before they are likely to be broadly accepted by the policy-making community.     

Policy Preceding Possibility? Examining Headline Composite Sustainability Indicators in the United Kingdom

Environmental equality, social justice and well-being are national headline indicators for the United Kingdom (UK), and community vibrancy is a rural headline indicator. All four of these indicators were designated as headline indicators prior to any robust definition or methodology for their measurement was articulated. Prior to the establishment of social justice and environmental equality as headline indicators, research commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs indicated that, at least in the foreseeable future, it would not be possible to operationalise these concepts as indicators of sustainable development. Research into well-being and community vibrancy also illustrated significant problems with their measurement, but in terms of these two indicators that research was carried out after their establishment as headline indicators. These findings illustrate problems with dialogue between the government and relevant experts: difficult to measure concepts have been erroneously designated as headline indicators for the UK.     

CONSTRUCTING A HEALTH AND SOCIAL INDICATOR FRAMEWORK FOR INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY HEALTH RESEARCH

Health and social indicators that capture the distinct historical, social, and cultural contexts of Indigenous communities can play an important role in informing the planning and delivery of community interventions. There is currently considerable interest in cataloguing and vetting meaningful community-level health and social indicators that could be applied to research and health promotion activities in Indigenous communities in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, inclusive of conventional indicators as well as measures developed specifically for use in or with Indigenous communities. To avoid haphazard selection of indicators, and to assure the comprehensiveness and relevance of any given set of indicators, a framework that can accommodate and conceptually classify indicators representing a full range of domains is required. We report here on the development of a conceptual framework, by which Indigenous community indicators, and more general community-level social indicators, can be sorted, catalogued, and systematically classified within four hierarchical levels. The indicator framework was developed across Canada, Australia and New Zealand in consultation with academic researchers and Indigenous community stakeholders, building from established health and social indicator systems. The Indigenous indicator framework permits Indigenous communities, public health researchers, and funding agencies to compare and select the most appropriate indicators for application in specific contexts from the multitude of existing indicators.     

Ranking and Prioritization of Emergency Departments Based on Multi-indicator Systems

In this work we discuss how Emergency Departments (EDs) can be ranked on the basis of multiple indicators. This problem is of absolute relevance due to the increasing importance of EDs in regional healthcare systems and it is also complex as the number of indicators that have been proposed in the literature to measure ED performance is very high. Current literature faces this problem using synthetic (or numerically aggregated) indicators of a set of performance measures but, although simple, this solution has a number of drawbacks that make this choice inefficient: a compensation effect among the indicators; a high degree of subjectivism in the indicators weighting; opacity in the decision making; all the EDs are considered to be comparable. Indeed, the situations in which EDs are comparable (i.e. when all the performance of one ED are not lower than the performance indicators of the other) are a minority and incomparability is by itself a source of information that should be used to identify situations for which different policy actions should be designed. In this work we propose to use non compensatory composite indicators and partial ordering theory to rank and compare EDs giving value to the reasons of such an incomparability. These methods are applied on a case study of 19 EDs in an administrative region in Italy.     

The level of civilisation a new field for the application of social indicators

Social indicators have been recognised for some time as a means of measuring various facets of social life which were difficult to quantify, such as level of living, environment conditions and the quality of life. It is proposed here that they should also be applied to the most important of them all, and namely to the quality of the society itself. Quality of society is the outcome of society's development, it may be seen as a level of civilisation, i.e. a position on a scale between vile barbarism and highest civilisation. This position may be given a numerical expression in terms of social indicators. A suggestion for constructing such a system of indicators is presented in this paper.     

Data Envelopment Analysis for Composite Indicators: A Multiple Layer Model

The development of a composite indicator (CI) over a set of individual indicators is worthwhile in case the methodological aggregation process is sound and the results are clear. It can then be used as a powerful tool for performance evaluation, benchmarking, and decision making. In this respect, data envelopment analysis (DEA), as a self appraisal technique, has recently received considerable attention in the construction of CIs for policy analysis and public communication. However, due to the ever increasing complexity of numerous performance evaluation problems, more and more potential indicators might be developed to represent an evaluation activity in a more comprehensive way. These indicators might also belong to different categories and further be linked to one another constituting a multilayer hierarchical structure. Simply treating all the indicators to be in the same layer as is the case in the basic DEA model thereby ignores the information on their hierarchical structure, and further leads up to weak discriminating power and unrealistic weight allocations. To overcome this limitation, a multiple layer DEA-based CI model is developed in this study to embody a hierarchical structure of indicators in the DEA framework, and both its primal and dual form are realized. The proposed model is illustrated by constructing a composite road safety performance index for a set of European countries.     

Sense of Community and the Perception of the Socio-Physical Environment: A Comparison Between Urban Centers of Different Sizes Across Europe

Measures of subjective well-being, and especially life evaluations, or judgments about how happy people are with their lives as a whole, enrich and empower social indicators research. They do this by requiring other social indicators as explanatory variables and providing a coherent encompassing framework within which the relative importance of other social indicators can be established.     

Level of development of a country: A possible new approach

Human development is a multidimensional phenomenon. It depends on a number of non-monetary aspects of life (social indicators of development). Per capita gross domestic product (PCGDP) is a means to achieve these nonmonetary aspects of life. To what extent PCGDP of a country is transformed into social development is an important phenomenon. Income elasticities of social indicators with respect to PCGDP reflect such relationship. This study attempts to find income elasticities of eight social indicators of development with respect to per capita real gross domestic product (PCRGDP) adjusted for purchasing power parity and expressed in international dollars for four points of time: 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990. The income elasticities of social indicators may be identified as necessity, luxury and inferior. On the basis of the nature of the income elasticities of the social indicators of development the level of development of a country may be identified. This paper attempts to identify the level of development of a country on the basis of the nature of the income elasticities of the social indicators of development.     

The Multiple Uses of Subjective Well-Being Indicators

There are barriers to the significant use of subjective well-being indicators in policy making. These barriers can be overcome, but this will take a co-ordinated effort. These indicators can play multiple roles. They can stimulate public debate, inform the development of formal or informal economic models, influence the choice of other indicators more directly related to policy outcomes, draw attention to important issues which might otherwise be ignored, input into a new form of cost benefit analysis, be used in before and after appraisal, and be used by the public to hold politicians to account. Subjective indicators are better placed to play these roles than either dashboards or indexes based on objective indicators. It is not clear whether they will play these roles and two scenarios are possible. In the first, the relatively marginal role the indicators are beginning to play in policy will be expand, but they will not move centre stage, or in any way challenge existing headline indicators such as gross domestic product. In the second, a set of tools is developed which politicians and journalists find useful, both for communicating and for developing their ideas. In this scenario, the ideas implicit in subjective well-being indicators find their way into public debate and thus drive policy change. As a result they do challenge existing headline indicators.     

Local Meanings of Wellbeing and the Construction of Wellbeing Indicators

There have been attempts to develop and employ tools for measuring development that shifted away from economic growth. In Thailand, a number of alternative indicators to measure the progress of development were created and employed. However, the indicators and measurements of development continued to be challenging, partly because of the dynamic changes of socio-economics, and partly due to the inconsistency between aggregated and local, or individual units of measurement. This paper aims to study meanings and develop wellbeing indicators of a community in the Northeast of Thailand. The data was derived from qualitative research conducted during 2013–2014. Focus group discussions with thirty-five formal and informal community leaders were used, and in-depth interviews were applied to collect data from thirty key informants. The results showed that the indicators of community wellbeing are classified into four groups, namely objective community wellbeing, community trust, community security, and community strength. The objective community wellbeing indicators were consistent with those that are used to guide policy and practice in Thailand. However, based on the local meaning of community wellbeing, new dimensions of indicators were found and proposed. This study recommended that these indicators should be developed further, to be employed as a tool to monitor progress, especially by local government.     

Developing indicators of environmental quality: The experience of the council on environmental quality

In the late 1960s there was great interest in the U.S. environmental field for duplicating the success economists had in developing statistical indicators. This article traces the history of the development of environmental indices at the Council on Environmental Quality from initial research aimed at preparing one or at best a few indices of environmental quality to the most recent effort which aims to organize indicators showing conditions and trends on a wide variety of environmental topics. The Council intends to distribute the findings periodically. The report may be viewed as a briefing book for policymakers. Criteria used in selecting and developing indicators —relevancy, selectivity, availability of data, changes over time, statistical quality, and scope of coverage — are discussed. A key purpose of this effort is to improve the quality of data available for making national environmental policies. Appendixes included are: (1) a bibliography of works dealing with the general problems of developing, using, and evaluating environmental indicators; (2) a selection of over 100 U.S. Federal periodical reponts on specific aspects of environmental conditions; and (3) a comprehensive framework for identifying topics and selecting meaningful and useful environmental indicators to be used as the report outline.     

The potential of social indicators: Minimum conditions for impact at the national level as suggested by a study of the use of ‘social indicators’ 73

Empirical evidence is presented which suggests that the use of social indicators among upper level government officials in the United States is minimal at present. Further, the level of use is not likely to be increased by improved measurement procedures, aesthetically improved packaging, or more widespread dissemination of such information among persons who influence policy decisions. The power of such information can be expected to be no greater than that of ‘mere’ statistics unless deliberate effort is made to institutionalize the importance of social indicators into government operations in conjunction with policy planning, goal setting, and commitment to the use of indicators as a system of national evaluation of progress toward the achievement of societal objectives. Several recommendations are made to develop the potential of social indicators and to increase their creative and useful application in matters of public policy at the national level.     

The Social Indicators Movement at 50: Onwards in Unity or Divided?

Before we can move forward with new topics in quality of life research, it would be useful to settle a number of issues that have been a source of debate over the last 50 years. Broadly speaking, this leads to seven principles for measuring and describing quality of life: the central focus is on people; quality of life is about more than just economics; a full measurement must incorporate both objective and subjective indicators; quality of life incorporates several dimensions; the outcome must be viewed separately from the determinants; there must be attention for distribution and difference; the domains can be combined into an index (though this is not essential). The main debate is perhaps about whether or not there should be an index. An index is necessary if we wish to give social indicators the same status as economic indicators have through GDP. In my view, that is desirable. Once these principles are established, the agenda for future social indicators research can be shaped using a model-based approach incorporating several recommendations from Land and Michalos.     

A System of Sustainability Indicators for the Province of Thai Binh,Vietnam

Sustainable Development is a broad and universal concept. Indicators are a basis to measure sustainability and to direct policies that aim to achieve a better quality of life. Thai Binh, a coastal province in North Vietnam is strongly concerned about strategic sustainability development. To select a system of sustainability indicators, the Delphi method was applied in 2012. A two-round questionnaire was organized to use with 32 experts, who acted as participants. 69 indicators were selected from 98 listed indicators: 15 related to economic development, 5 to the sea and coastal zone, 1 to the global economic partnership, 4 to consumption and production patterns, 7 to poverty, 3 to governance, 9 to health, 4 to education, 3 to demographics, 2 to natural hazards, 5 to atmosphere, 7 to land, and 3 to freshwater. Conversely, 29 other indicators were rejected. The Delphi method allows indicator selection for identification of the process of sustainability. The system of indicators, as the first important step of the sustainable development process, provides useful information for decision makers and planners as well sustainability strategy. It is planned that the indicators selected should be applied in the province.     

Measuring rural development in Nigeria: The place of social indicators

The use of economic growth indicators for the purpose of measuring rural development has for a long time been in practice in Nigeria and in many other developing nations. The inadequacy of this measure in depicting development in the area of societal well-being has suggested that social indicators could be a more meaningful tool to monitor and evaluate the level and conditions of rural development. This paper highlights the information needs for, and problems of incorporating social indicators in the measurement of rural development in Nigeria. It is recognized that for social indicators to be a useful tool in a place such as rural Nigeria, they must reflect the sociocultural peculiarities and the life style of the country's rural population. The paper finally suggests an improvement of the quality of social statistics in rural Nigeria to enhance their functional values to planners and policy makers.     

Doing better than the optimum

There may be a need for operationalizing basic social indicators like unemployment, inflation, crime, and others in such a way as to allow for going beyond what has traditionally been considered as the zero point of unemployment, inflation, crime, or other social indicators. Doing so can be helpful in stimulating greater societal achievement and happiness, especially with appropriate incentives and a growth perspective. Doing so can also facilitate better comparisons of alternative policies across nations and across other policies.     

Deprivation index for small areas in Spain

The term deprivation is often used to refer to economic or social shortages in a given geographical area. This concept of deprivation has been identified for years using simple indicators such as income level, education and social class. One of the advantages of using simple indicators is the availability of data, since they come directly from sources of information like censuses and population registers. However, the main disadvantage of these indicators is their limited usefulness when measuring a concept as complex as deprivation with a single variable. One possible solution to this problem is using compound indices, made up of a combination of simple indicators. For years, the concept of material deprivation in Spain has been measured using indices or indicators imported from other countries. However, there are no studies that investigate if all of these variables are really related to material deprivation in Spain. In this context, the objective of this study is to create a synthetic index for material deprivation for the municipalities in Spain, bearing in mind the variables available from the Population and Housing Census. The index was built on a principal components factor analysis. The analysis showed two factors. The first factor showed a high positive correlation to the variables relating to illiteracy rate, unemployment rate and percentage of manual labourers, while the second factor was seen as highly positively correlated to the variables relating to the percentage of homes without access to a vehicle and the dependency index and also correlated, though negatively, to the percentage of foreigners between 16 and 49 who lived abroad in 1991. The variables that make up the first factor can be considered to be an approximation of the concept of deprivation in Spain. This study proposes a deprivation index made up of three simple indicators available from national information sources: percentage of illiteracy, percentage of unemployment and percentage of manual labourers. With this index, the criteria for measuring deprivation in Spanish municipalities can be unified and a comparison of the results of the different studies in our context facilitated.     

Social Monitoring and Reporting: A Success Story in Applied Research on Social Indicators and Quality of Life

From its beginnings research on social indicators was not primarily considered as pure, but rather applied research in terms of the regular monitoring of and reporting on quality of life. Thus, the successes—but eventually also failures—of social indicators research may first of all be visible in its most important field of application. Social monitoring and reporting activities, which can be traced back to the early 1970s provide quantitative information and empirically based analytical knowledge on well-being and progress in a single society or groups of societies to be used for different purposes, including policy making. Providing an overview over the variety of social monitoring and reporting projects emerging from social indicators research is supposed to be important with a view to form a more solid fundament for present and future discourses and initiatives in the field of measuring and monitoring well-being and progress. The article looks back to this field of applied social indicators research and—with a focus on Europe—identifies patterns and recent trends in this sort of activities. By looking forward, it finally discusses selected issues that are considered to be crucial for further improvements in this field.     

Social indicators: A statistician's view

In the following we consider the problem areas of social indicator research which are of concern to the statistician and in which he can prove helpful. Among these are the purposes of social indicators, what social variables should be considered as conceivable variables related to quality of life, what data should be collected taking in account the difficulty of not being able to directly measure variables of interest, how does one collect the data (which is usually in the form of a time series) guarding against multicollinearity, and how should the collected data be handled and analyzed. We discuss why in social indicator research the secular trends, cyclical movements, seasonal variations and irregular fluctuations must be taken into account. Techniques are discussed for relating lead indicators in one time period to coincident indicators in another period. Finally we present a select bibliography in canonical correlation, forecasting, indicators and index numbers, path analysis, regression analysis, simulation techniques, time series analysis and other areas useful in analyzing social indicator data.     

Is Economic Policy Uncertainty Related to Suicide Rates? Evidence from the United States

The main objective of this paper was to see whether different countries around the world show differences in their sustainability levels as captured in the indicators from the Sustainable Society Index (SSI, Van de Kerk and Manuel in Ecol Econ 66:228–242, 2012) according to their level of income. To do so, the X-STATIS and CO-STATIS multivariate techniques were employed. With these methods, our sample of 151 countries and 21 indicators can be jointly represented along four time periods. The results obtained permit us to visualize that the groups of countries by income levels show differences in some of the variables from the SSI, because of the lack of proximities between those variables and the countries. Moreover, with the X-STATIS technique, the possible evolution of the countries or indicators over time can be represented, and with CO-STATIS, the relations between the social, economic and environmental aspects can be shown as well. From our results we were able to deduce that, on the one hand, social and economic indicators, such as Public Debt or Employment, are associated with countries having high and upper-middle incomes, for example, Chile, Israel, Malta, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Spain, Portugal, France, Poland and Czech Republic. On the other hand, countries with low and lower-middle incomes are more associated with environmental issues. Also, after finding that the differences between the countries by income levels are mainly caused by the economic indicators, we carried out two CO-STATIS analyses, one for social and economic variables, and the other for economic and environmental variables. These findings led us to deduce that, generally, the social and economic indicators are not related to each other, nor are the economic indicators related to the environmental ones. However, for some of the countries individually both relations may be possible.