The Determinants of Economic Growth Versus Genuine Progress in South Korea

This paper examines whether the drivers of economic growth are the same as those for genuine progress in the case of South Korea. Using data covering the period 1970–2005, the paper first constructs a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). An empirical model is then specified and estimated using growth in GDP per capita and growth in the GPI per capita as dependent variables. Results indicate that while physical capital, research and development, exports, and inflation are all important in determining growth in GDP per capita, only physical capital is a driver of genuine progress. These findings highlight the need for policymakers to identify and target other determinants of genuine progress to improve the well-being of South Koreans, rather than focus attention on traditional sources of economic growth.     

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.     

Rethinking of Economic Growth and Life Satisfaction in Post-Wwii Japan – A Fresh Approach

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been utilized by academics and policy makers to indicate the economic well-being of the people. However, economic growth measures cannot capture fully the overall well-being of the people. This paper has tested quality of economic growth in Japan after World War II as to whether it has brought about positive outcome in the well-being of its citizens. Comparison between GDP and GPI (Genuine Progress Index) has revealed that GDP does not fit as well with people’s life satisfaction trend as GPI. Prefecture-based rankings on GDP, Human Development Index (HDI) and Life Satisfaction have shown that there are clear gaps between objective measures and subjective measures to indicate the overall well-being of the people. Also, analysis on major determinants for people’s life satisfaction reveals that older people, women, non-employed people, and those who live in subsidized housings felt satisfied with their life.     

Inter-Country Inequiality in Social Indicators of Development

In 1955 Kuznets developed a hypothesis about the relationshipbetween the degree of personal income inequality within a countryand the level of economic development of the country. Thishypothesis suggests that with economic growth, interpersonalincome inequality first increases but after a certain pointstarts to decline. This is known as the inverted-U hypothesis. In1965, Williamson applied this inverted-U hypothesis to the widelyobserved pattern of intra-country regional inequality witheconomic development. This hypothesis was later extended tointer-country inequality in Per Capita Gross National Product(PCGNP) by Ram (1989). The paradigm of development economics hasrecently been shifted from PCGNP to human well-being and it hasbeen broadly accepted that economic growth does not automaticallytranslate into human well-being. The present study is an attemptto extend the application of the inverted-U hypothesis to explainthe relationship between inter-country inequality in socialindicators of development and economic growth.     

Patterns of inter- and intra-regional inequality: A socio-economic approach

The regional development pattern of five regions, viz., North, South, Tropical America, Tropical Asia and Tropical Africa [see Theil (1989)] is studied using two indices based on a group of representative socio-economic indicators. The analysis is based on measures of ‘inequality’ and ‘mobility’. Comparison of results using these indices and the Per Capita Gross Domestic Product (PCGDP) reveals that while the situation with respect to PCGDP has worsened over the years, that with respect to the socio-economic indicators has become better.     

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.     

Measuring the Well-Beings of the Developing Countries: Achievement and Improvement Indices

The paradigm of development in the recent days has been shifted from Per Capita Gross National Product (PCGNP) to Human Well-being. It has also been admitted broadly that PCGNP does not automatically transformed into human well-being. It has thus become common practice to use a range of socio-economic variables for measuring the human Well-being (quality of life) in a country. In order to measure the well-being of about 70 developing countries, this study widens the scope of the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) introduced by Morris, by incorporating a number of social aspects of life. On the basis of these indicators, the achievements in the quality of life of these countries are analyzed in this study. An attempt is also made to compare the decadal improvements in their performances in respect of the quality of life over a period of 1960 to 1990. The study also attempts to analyze the relations between achievements and improvements of quality of life and achievements and improvements in terms of PCRGDP of the countries.     

Measuring Well-Being and Progress

Well-being is becoming a concept which is more and more involved in any world development consideration. A large amount of work is being carried out to study measurements of well-being, including a more holistic vision on the development and welfare of a country. This paper proposes an idea of well-being and progress being in equilibrium with each other. This is distant from the two extreme positions: poor but happy, and rich then happy; too romantic the first, and reductive the second. After a short explanation on the meaning of Objective and Subjective well-being, we show some interesting relations between economic and social variables, and we propose a new index to measure the well-being and progress of the countries: the Well-being & Progress Index (WIP). It includes several aspects of well-being and progress, like human rights, economic well-being, equality, education, research, quality of urban environment, ecological behaviours, subjective well-being, longevity, and violent crime. The most frequently used indexes usually only focus on some aspects, like ecology, or economy, or policy, or education, or happiness, and so forth. On the contrary, this new WIP index allows a global and well-balanced vision, thanks to the large range of indicators used, and how representative they are.     

Preaching to the Choir: Are the Commission’s Recommendations Already Applied?

As we have seen, the Commission’s final report outlines a comprehensive framework by defining some guidelines by: (a) identifying the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress, including measurement problems; (b) considering what additional information might be required for the production of more relevant social progress indicators; and (c) assessing the feasibility of alternative measurement and presentation tools. The report argues that GDP should not be completely eliminated by the options for measuring progress, but must be integrated with other information. In particular, the Committee defines three major areas in which indicators should be developed: economic conditions, quality of life and sustainability. In the European scene, but not only, there are many initiatives that aim at measuring the progress of countries and well-being through different conceptual frameworks and by using several indicators. This work intends to analyze some of those relevant initiatives by comparing and confronting them to the Commission’s recommendations, in order to check what already fits the commission recommendations and what still needs to be defined in that perspective.     

老龄化背景下的人口红利开发与经济发展

本文分析人口加速老龄化背景下人口红利影响经济效益的作用机制,将人口红利的具体作用机制拆分为三个效应,并使用2001—2010年中国285个地级及地级以上城市面板数据进行实证检验。计量估计显示,劳动力数量结构与人均产出间存在明显的正U型关系,劳动力的数量结构仍是人均产出提高的重要动力,中部地区作用最为显著,而东部地区劳动力成本上升倒逼经济转型。通过劳动力的跨部门、跨区域转移、加强人力资本投入以及产业结构升级等,可以进一步实现劳动力资源的优化配置,持续开发人口红利。     

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”.     

Measuring Progress and Well-Being: A Comparative Review of Indicators

We provide a new database sampling well-being and progress indicators implemented since the 1970s at all geographic scales. Starting from an empirical assessment, we describe and quantify trends in the institutional basis, methodology, and content of indicators which are intended to capture the broadest conceptions of human social progress. We pay special attention to the roles of sustainability and subjective well-being in these efforts, and find that certain types of indicators are more successful in terms of transparency, accountability, as well as longevity. Our taxonomy encompasses money-denominated accounts of “progress”, unaggregated collections of indicators, indices, and measures oriented around subjective well-being. We find that a most promising innovation is the indices whose weights are accountable to empirical data, in particular through models of subjective well-being. We conclude by amplifying others’ advocacy for the appropriate separation of current well-being from environmental indicators, and for the avoidance of aggregation except where it is meaningful.     

Ecological Economic Policy for Sustainable Development: Potentials and Domains of Intervention for Delinking Approaches

Due to the increasing environmental problems, conventional environmental policy will not suffice to secure a development path that can be sustainable on a global scale. This article establishes a conceptual framework for general strategies to reach the goals of ecological sustainability and individual well-being. Environmental impact, material input, income/production, the amount of services utilised, and well-being are the fundamental elements of this framework and their linkages are highlighted as possible targets of ecological economic policy. It is clear that current environmental policies, based on a rather narrow, reductionist view of the man-nature relationship, will not suffice. We investigate under which conditions a de-linking of individual well-being from environmental impacts can be achieved; a dramatic dematerialisation of the industrialised economies turns out to be a crucial element. This dematerialisation, we argue, can be achieved only putting a limit to quantitative economic growth, but nevertheless without decreasing the individual well-being, by concentrating the attention on highly valuable eco-efficient services rather than on the production/acquisition of material goods.     

城市可持续发展能力环境影响评价经济模型

本文在传统的城市宏观经济运行过程模型的基础上,将世界银行所提出的真实储蓄加以修正,并引入到城市经济运行模式中,其中既考虑了人口(人口的增长)、经济(国内生产总值的增长速度)因素,又考虑到了社会因素(国内生产总值中的经常性教育投资和科研经费留存)、环境(大气、水环境污染)及资源(矿产)等因素,提出了城市可持续发展能力环境影响评价经济模型,并以此为基础分析了西安市的可持续发展能力。     

Prediction of Human Development from Environmental Indicators

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) list the objectives and targets that should be addressed to solve the global issues regarding sustainable development. They encompass the social, economic and environmental dimensions and search for solutions that are able not only to monitor but also to control the operational indicators attributed to each objective. It is expected that many of these indicators are associated to each other and the accurate understanding of these correlations allows to build predictive statistical models that can improve the monitoring and controlling of variables. It would increase the rate of success in achieving the SDG. This study tested a linear multivariate model able to predict the human development index based on environmental variables which are related to SDG 3 (health), 4 (education), 8 (sustainable economic growth and decent work) and 15 (protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems). We fitted the models using the Linear Discriminant Analysis and Best Subset Selection applied to a Linear Multivariate Regression. The model predictive ability was assessed by R² and cross-validation (CV). The results showed that exposure to unsafe sanitation, access to drinking water, tree cover loss, unsafe water quality, wastewater treatment level, and household air pollution are excellent predictors of human development index of a population, with R² = 0.94 and 10-fold CV Mean Squared Error equal to 0.0014. This tool can help stakeholders to monitor and control indicators attributed to good health and well-being, quality education, clean water and sanitation, decent work and economic growth, sustainable cities and communities and life on land sustainable development goals.     

An Empirical Approach to the Study of Well-being Among Rural Men and Women in Ghana

The paper indicates using community development and sustainable livelihood theories as lenses that well-being indicators vary among societies, especially in developing countries due cultural differences. The study which was carried in three rural communities in Ho Municipality in the Ghana was to show the extent to which men’s and women’s sense of well-being were determined by their local economic, religious, social, and education indicators; all of which were driven by their cultural values. Since men and women placed different values on religious, social, economic, education indicators, the paper discusses that their importance to overall well-being also differs between men and women.     

Measuring Subjective Issues of Well-Being and Quality of Life in the European Statistical System

Over the last decades, the European Statistical System has developed many European statistics and indicators to measure social progress and sustainable development. Initially only in a few cases the measuring instruments contained questions on subjective issues. With the adoption of its Communication on “gross domestic product and beyond” the Commission has given an impetus to the development of subjective social indicators. This has led to the establishment of a first set of indicators on quality of life and well-being and to a new instrument (the 2013 EU-SILC ad-hoc module for measuring subjective well-being). This new step in European statistics creates an important potential for researchers to engage in in-depth analysis and for national and European Union policy makers to use the resulting indicators—and in casu subjective well-being indicators—for developing and monitoring policy strategies and programmes.     

A Measure of Well-Being Across the Italian Urban Areas: An Integrated DEA-Entropy Approach

In recent years, there has been an increasing proliferation of initiatives focusing on the concept of quality of life and well-being. At the centre of these studies there is the recognizing that the GDP offers only a partial perspective of factors affecting people’s lives. Following this line of the research, this paper is aimed at computing the well-being efficiencies of a sample of Italian Province capital cities, using a methodological approach that combines data envelopment analysis (DEA) with Shannon’s entropy formula. To avoid subjectivity in choosing a representative set of variables that proxy the phenomenon under study, we rely on the theoretical framework adopted by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) within the equitable and sustainable well-being (BES) project. The dashboard of indicators included in the analysis are related to the Ur-BES initiative, promoted by ISTAT to implement the BES framework at cities level. In a first step of the analysis, an immediate focus on separate dimensions of urban well-being is obtained by summarizing the plurality of available indicators through the building of composite indices. Next, the adopted integrated DEA–Shannon entropy approach has permitted to increase the discriminatory power of DEA procedure and attain a more reliable profiling of Italian Province capital cities well-being efficiencies. The results show a marked duality between the Northern and Southern cities, highlighting important differences in many aspects of human and ecosystem well-being.     

Changes in Population,Affluence, and Environmental Pressures During Industrialization: The Case of Austria 1830–1995

This paper relates changes in aggregate population, affluence (measured as GDP), and indicators for environmental pressures, the latter being based upon the socioeconomic metabolism concept, for Austria from 1830 to 1995. During this period of time Austria underwent a transition from a predominantly agricultural mode of substistence to an industrial economy. The Austrian population increased by a factor of 2.3, total GDP by a factor of 28.2 and per capita GDP by a factor of 12.2. Environmental indicators change by factors of between 0.85 and over 1000. In general we find that although efficiencies (environmental pressure per unit of GDP) increased dramatically, total environmental pressures increased considerably for most indicators, except for those that are related to an agricultural mode of subsistence. Our results indicate that environmental policies that aim to reduce the environmental pressure per unit of GDP (i.e., increase ecological efficiency) are not likely to be sufficient for sustainable development because efficiency gains are more than compensated for by increases in affluence. Instead, sustainability policy should focus on reducing total environmental pressures.     

The Measurement of Non-economic Inequality in Well-Being Indices

This paper is a critical review of composite well-being indices that account for inequality. Many well-being indices build upon the idea that while income and wealth are important, they do not constitute a person’s actual quality of life. However, first of all, the analysis finds that while well-being indices aim to go “beyond GDP” and other primarily economic indicators, many of them, unfortunately, do not focus on inequality at all. Secondly, most indices which include inequality in their measurement, only account for economic inequality. Thirdly, the article finds that the most comprehensive wellbeing index in terms of inequality is the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index which adjusts for economic, health and education inequality. This article finds that well-being indices should make further strides to ensure the capture of non-economic inequality in terms of education and health.