Purchasing Power Parities of Currencies and Real Expenditures from the International Comparison Program: Recent Results and Uses

The International Comparison Program (ICP) is a worldwide statistical initiative designed to estimate purchasing power parities (PPPs) that can be used as currency converters to compare the performance of countries around the world, thereby providing in-depth views of the distribution of resources worldwide. The 2011 round of the ICP was leveraged on the successful outcome of the 2005 round that included 146 countries, introducing various methodological improvements. The summary report and results from the 2011 round were released in April 2014 and provided PPPs, price levels indices, and expenditures in PPP terms for the GDP and major aggregates for 199 participating countries. More detailed results were released in June 2014 and a final comprehensive report in October 2014. The final report provided a more in-depth analysis of volume and per capita indices. The results stirred a strong debate among the user community because of their finding that the world has become more equal than previously thought. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the main results and findings of ICP 2011, its governance framework and partnership with the Eurostat-Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) PPP program, and the major methodological innovations that were implemented. The paper reviews the major uses of the PPPs generated by the ICP 2011 and the Eurostat-OECD PPP program, and concludes with thoughts about the future of the ICP.     

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.     

Estimating Cross Province and Municipal City Price Level Differences in China: Some Experiments and Results

The estimation of Sub-national purchasing power parities (PPPs) for countries where the regions and provinces have different level of development is fundamental for income, consumption, standard of living real term comparisons, as well as for measuring cross-region welfare inequality. This is even truer for large countries like China, where the above aggregates exhibit great variability among provinces. The aim of this paper is to compute the price level differences, measured by the PPPs, for 31 Chinese Provinces and Municipal Cities, based on a sample of 62 goods and services for the year 2014. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to do it since many years. After a short review of previous studies on China cross-province and municipal cities price level differences measurement and the illustration of methodology and data used, the results of our elaborations are presented and discussed. Taking Beijing as the base area, there is evidence that the PPP max/min ratio is 1.74, confirming the common belief that China cross-province and municipal cities price levels are significantly different.     

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.     

Rank-Optimal Weighting or “How to be Best in the OECD Better Life Index?”

We present a method of rank-optimal weighting which can be used to explore the best possible position of a subject in a ranking based on a composite indicator by means of a mathematical optimization problem. As an example, we explore the dataset of the OECD Better Life Index and compute for each country a weight vector which brings it as far up in the ranking as possible with the greatest advance of the immediate rivals. The method is able to answer the question “What is the best possible rank a country can achieve with a given set of weighted indicators?” Typically, weights in composite indicators are justified normatively and not empirically. Our approach helps to give bounds on what is achievable by such normative judgments from a purely output-oriented and strongly competitive perspective. The method can serve as a basis for exact bounds in sensitivity analysis focused on ranking positions. In the OECD Better Life Index data we find that 19 out the 36 countries in the OECD Better Life Index 2014 can be brought to the top of the ranking by specific weights. We give a table of weights for each country which brings it to its highest possible position. Many countries achieve their best rank by focusing on their strong dimensions and setting the weights of many others to zero. Although setting dimensions to zero is possible in the OECD’s online tool, this contradicts the idea of better life being multidimensional in essence. We discuss modifications of the optimization problem which could take this into account, e.g. by allowing only a minimal weight of one. Methods to find rank-optimal weights can be useful for various multidimensional datasets like the ones used to rank universities or employers.     

Students Mobility: Assessing the Determinants of Attractiveness Across Competing Territorial Areas

A central question for education authorities has become “which factors make a territory attractive for tertiary students?” Tertiary education is recognised as one of the most important assets for the development of a territory, thus students’ mobility becomes a brain drain issue whenever there are prevalent areas that attract students from other territories. In this paper, we try to identify the most important factors that could affect student mobility in Italy. In doing that we analyse students’ flows across competing territorial areas which supply tertiary education programs. We will consider a wide range of determinants related to the socio-economic characteristics of the areas as well as resources of the universities in the territories in terms of variety and quantity of the degree programs there available, financial endowments provided by Central Government, and services available to students. The Bradley–Terry modelling approach based on pair comparisons has been adopted to define the attractiveness of competing territories and assess how much the detected divergences can be attributed to factors directly related to the considered characteristics of the universities in the territory and how much is ascribable to inherent characteristics of the areas where the universities are located such as the labour market conditions. Furthermore, the adopted approach allows us to consider uncertainty in defining territorial attractiveness and making comparisons. In this way, we would like to provide some evidences to assess if the rules currently used by the Central Government to finance public universities on the basis of their capabilities to attract students really reward the efforts made by the university system in the area to improve their standard of quality or, on the contrary, reward the territorial features.     

Analysing International Student Mobility Flows in Higher Education: A Comparative Study on European Countries

The analysis of the factors pulling and pushing students in a foreign country to complete their higher education is key for the implementation of university policies aimed at increasing the number of credits gained by students abroad and hence the degree of internationalisation of institutions. Consistent with previous studies, the present contribution examines the roles played by countries in the Erasmus student mobility flows by considering a joint strategy of analysis based on social network analysis and exploratory data analysis. First, data on Erasmus student exchanges among countries are gathered at macro-level from the European Union Open Data Portal and network data structures are analysed. Second, educational indicators from the Eurostat website are collected to describe the investments in higher education. The main findings suggest the presence of a core-periphery configuration in the student mobility network with few central countries in which the economic benefits and the investments in education seem to act as key elements for university attractiveness.

     

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.     

Towards International and Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration for the Measurements of Quality of Life

This paper focuses on three main subjects: (1) monitoring quality of life (QoL) in old age; (2) international and interdisciplinary collaboration for QoL research; and (3) computer-based technology and infrastructure assisting (1) and (2). This type of computer-supported cooperative work in the social sciences has been termed eHumanities or eSocial Science. Although QoL issues matter for all ages, given the size of population aging and the demographic outlook of developed countries, QoL in old age is one of the most pressing issues to study (Walker and Mollenkopf in Quality of life in old age: international and multi-disciplinary perspectives, Springer, The Netherlands, 2007). Despite the recognized need for good measurement methods in QoL (e.g., Stiglitz et al. in The measurement of economic performance and social progress revisited. progress revisited. OFCE working documents, Observatoire Francais des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE), Paris, 2009), effective mechanisms allowing cross-country comparisons are still rare. In the context of QoL or human well-being research and measurement, one of the most influential concepts is the capability approach (CA). Yet, the operationalization of the CA has long been one of the serious challenges faced by capabilities and quality of life researchers. As regards to this issue, we argue that modern technology has the potential to provide ample tools for enhancing the measurement of human well-being, and facilitating large-scale collaborative research on the QoL. This paper demonstrates a methodology, procedures, and tools that we have developed, based on the new technologies designed and developed for both governmental and intergovernmental (OECD) sponsored assessments and that are ready to be used for QoL analysis. We propose a viable alternative for facilitating international and interdisciplinary research collaboration to develop a methodology and a dashboard of indicators to monitor the progress of human well-being over the years and to formalize its multidimensional measure for international comparisons.     

Materialism and Quality of Life

An attempt is made in this paper to establish a foundation for a theory of materialism and quality of life. The theory posits that overall life satisfaction (quality of life) is partly determined by satisfaction with standard of living. Satisfaction with standard of living, in turn, is determined by evaluations of one's actual standard of living compared to a set goal. Materialists experience greater dissatisfaction with their standard of living than nonmaterialists, which in turn spills over to overall life causing dissatisfaction with life in general. Materialists experience dissatisfaction with their standard of living because they set standard of living goals that are inflated and unrealistically high. These goals set by materialists are more influenced by affective-based expectations (such as ideal, deserved, and need-based expectations) than cognitive-based ones (such as predictive, past, and ability based expectations). Materialists' ideal standard-of-living expectations are influenced by social comparisons involving remote referents, more so than comparisons involving standards that are situationally imposed. Examples of situationally-imposed standards are perceptions of wealth, income, and material possessions of family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and so on. In contrast, examples of standards based on remote sources are perceptions of standard of living of others in one's community, town, state, country, other countries; perceptions of standard of living of others based on gender, age, education, ethnicity, occupation, and social class. This tendency to use remote referents in social comparisons may account for materialists' inflated and value-laden expectations of their standard of living. Materialists' deserved standard-of-living expectations are influenced by the tendency to engage in equity comparisons involving income and work. Thus, materialists compare themselves with others that seem to have more income and worked no harder. These equity comparisons generate feelings of inequity, injustice, anger, or envy. These emotions may also account for materialists' inflated and value-laden expectations of their standard of living. Materialists' standard-of-living expectations based on minimum needs are influenced by the tendency to spend more than generate income. This proclivity to overconsume and underproduce may be partly responsible for materialists' inflated and value-laden expectations of their standard of living.     

Quality of Life in the City of Delhi: An Assessment Based on Access to Basic Services

The quality of life is a fundamental aspect of development and advancement of human societies. However, measuring and expressing the quality of life in any given setting has proved difficult because it includes multiple dimensions. Further, methods based on questionnaire surveys have to contend with responses that are inexact and difficult to quantify. Here I estimate the quality of life of people living in the Indian city of Delhi using fuzzy sets theory, an approach that is designed to handle inexact or ‘fuzzy’ outcomes. Using a stratified random sample set of 330 households, I compare different locations in Delhi based on their access to seven basic services that is assumed to depict the quality of life. I found that the majority of services (in particular, the overall maintenance and transport services) are poor in resettlement colonies, unauthorised colonies, and urbanised villages. The quality of services improves in colonies under the jurisdiction of the Delhi Cantonment Board, the New Delhi Municipal Council, and approved colonies of the Delhi Development Authority. The overall patterns suggest that the differences in satisfaction and access are primarily influenced by location, and within each location they are influenced by economic conditions. Over 36 % of Delhi’s households, which are classified as ‘definitely poor’ and ‘extremely vulnerable’, may be deprived of transport services, around 44 % are deprived of overall maintenance services and over 29 % lack well-maintained green spaces in their neighbourhood. The analysis should draw the attention of policymakers on spatial aspects of development planning.     

Comparison of GDP Per Capita Data in Penn World Table and World Development Indicators

This paper compares data on GDP per capita, which is used in almost every cross-country study, from two different sources which are used by numerous researchers and other users throughout the world. The methodology consists of taking GDP per capita in international dollars for the ICP benchmark year 2005 for each country from World Development Indicators 2012 CD-ROM (WDI) and Penn World Table 7.1 (PWT), which are the current (2012) versions of these well-known sources. A similar exercise is undertaken for World Development Indicators 2011 CD-ROM and Penn World Table 7.0, which are the last versions of the data. The WDI and PWT data are also compared with the benchmark estimates from the last International Comparison Program (ICP). Huge differences are found between the two sources for numerous countries in both the current and the last versions. The number of countries for which WDI and the ICP benchmark numbers show huge differences is small, but there are many countries for which PWT and the ICP benchmark numbers show large differences. The study seems important for judging how data on this crucial variable from two most widely used sources agree or differ. The reported huge differences suggest that the users may exercise caution in drawing strong conclusions from information derived from either source, and may consider doing some sensitivity checks based on data from the other source. A simple illustration is provided to indicate how use of data from each source might affect the results.     

Comparative Examination of Self-Perceived Health and Other Measures of the Quality of Life Across the EU-27

In various fields of research self-perceived health has been defined and analysed as a significant measure of the health-related quality of life, and also as a predictor of health status. This paper examines the determinants of self-perceived health in the EU-27 area in order to find whether a common set of governmental policies could improve the self-perceived health and whether this positive effect would remain positive and significant on other measures of the quality of life as well as across the quintiles of income distribution. A number of panel regression models using the first-difference GMM estimator are applied to comparatively examine self-perceived health together with other measures of health status and quality of life, based on Eurostat data from 2003 to 2012. The empirical results of the paper could provide useful insights for the European health policy and other common actions and policies in the field of the quality of life.     

Fuzzy Measures of Longitudinal Poverty in a Comparative Perspective

In this paper we present a methodology for the study of longitudinal aspects of monetary and multi-dimensional poverty, and apply this in a multi-country comparative context. The conventional poor/non-poor dichotomy is replaced by defining poverty as a matter of degree, determined by the place of the individual in the income distribution. The same methodology facilitates the inclusion of other dimensions of deprivation into the analysis: by appropriately weighting indicators of deprivation to reflect their dispersion and correlation, we can construct measures of non-monetary deprivation in its various dimensions. An important contribution of the paper is to identify rules for the intersection and union of fuzzy sets appropriate for the study of poverty and deprivation. These rules allow us to meaningfully study the persistence of poverty and deprivation over time. We establish the consistency of the approach when applied to a time sequence of any length. We can thus study longitudinally over time a whole range of indicators of poverty and deprivation, from cross-sectional monetary poverty rates to multi-dimensional indicators of deprivation: in particular, we propose the new “Fuzzy At-persistent-risk-of-poverty rate”, and compare it with the corresponding Laeken indicator adopted by Eurostat.     

Gentrifizierung in Wien, Chicago und Mexiko Stadt

The lack of comparative gentrification research is regularly addressed by the scientific community. Despite the vast amount of isolated case-studies from different urban contexts, there are only few comparisons of gentrified neighborhoods on a global level. It is hypothesized that to a large extent the lack of international comparisons is based on the limits of quantitative secondary data. Therefore, a qualitative research project was designed to develop an analytical scheme of categories. An actor-analysis was conducted in three neighborhoods in Vienna, Chicago and Mexico City. The semi-structured interviews were analyzed in a qualitative content analysis and then linked to the theoretical gentrification-framework. The result, an analytical scheme of 14 categories, provides a new approach to face the significant lack of international comparisons.     

Is Inequality a Latent Construct? An Assessment of Economic Inequality Indicators and Their Relation with Social Cohesion in Europe

In this article, we analyse the relation between different economic inequality indicators and social cohesion. Previous research usually narrows down economic inequality to income inequality, or distinguishes several types of economic inequality. Little attention has until now been given to how different aspects of economic inequality might be related to each other and can have an effect on social cohesion. This article analyses several indicators of economic inequality and makes a distinction between indicators measuring income inequality, poverty, economic strain and unequal distributions of wealth. Arguing that these indicators represent different aspects of inequality, we hypothesise that they cannot be reduced to one latent concept of inequality and have specific relations with social cohesion. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis. This resulted in two different factors: one associated with economic hardship, and one associated with imbalances in market outcomes. This would imply that inequality indicators can be classified into two underlying concepts. Secondly, we related the factor scores of the two latent concepts to the social cohesion indicators via regression analyses. This paper focuses on European countries and uses pooled data from the European Social Survey (period 2006–2012), in combination with macro-level data drawn from the OECD, Eurostat and the World Bank. The results demonstrate that the strength of the link between inequality and citizens’ attitudes depends on the type of inequality indicator we analyse: only the factor economic deprivation can be significantly linked to social cohesion.     

Country Performance Evaluation: The DEA Model Approach

This study employs four data envelopment analysis (DEA) models to evaluate the performance efficiency of 21 OECD countries and assess whether the undesirable outputs are over-produced relative to desirable outputs. In evaluating the performance of OECD countries via super-efficiency models, this study focuses on two aspects. First, employing the concept of the Sharpe ratio, we propose another method to deal with undesirable outputs (the unemployment rate, inflation, and air pollution) in DEA. This approach can reveal the relative importance of desirable outputs and undesirable outputs, detect whether undesirable outputs are over-produced, and obtain more accurate efficiency scores. Second, we examine whether knowledge capital can improve a country’s efficiency scores. Our empirical results support the above arguments. In addition, research and development (R&D) expenditures, the proxy variable for knowledge capital, can indeed improve countries’ efficiency scores, implying that the endogenous growth theory is supported in OECD countries. Evidently, whether the undesirable outputs are included in the DEA models and are properly treated is crucial in the evaluation of efficiency values.

     

Where do low risk women live relative to maternity services across Victoria? Expanding access to public homebirth models across Victoria

ProblemCurrently <1% of Australian women give birth at home.BackgroundIn Australia there are very few options for women to access public funded homebirth.AimWe aimed to use geo-mapping to identify the number of women eligible for homebirth in Victoria, based on the criteria of uncomplicated pregnancies and residing within 15–25 kms of suitable maternity services, to plan future maternity care options.MethodsRetrospective study of births between 2015 and 2017 in Victoria, Australia. All women who were identified as having a low risk pregnancy at the beginning of pregnancy were included. The number of women within 15 and 25 km of a suitable Victorian public maternity hospital and catchment boundaries around each hospital were determined.FindingsBetween 2015 and 2017, 126,830 low risk women gave birth in Victoria, of whom half live within 25 km of seven Victorian hospitals. Currently, 2% of suitable women who live close to the current public homebirth models accessed them.DiscussionWe present a method to inform the expansion of maternity service options using Victoria as an example. On the basis of the maximum number of low risk women living close by, we have also identified the Victorian maternity services that would be most suitable for creation of public homebirth or low risk continuity of midwifery models.ConclusionThis approach could can be used to plan other maternity care services.     

A Multidimensional Approach in International Comparative Policy Analysis Based on Demographic Projections

The present study adopts a multidimensional approach to classifying countries in international comparative policy analyses. The article builds a data-based typology founded on future demographic projections of the United Nations. Latent class analysis is used to identify various demographic profiles of countries based on fertility rates, net migration rates, and dependency ratios. There is great value in identifying future changes in population composition, as it enables governments to set policy agenda, prioritize needs, and prepare better for what lies ahead. The paper demonstrates the value of such typology to social services, by analyzing the demographic profiles and estimating their implications for future challenges in educational provision. The contributions of the paper to international comparative policy analysis are discussed.     

An Indicator Framework for Linking Historic Preservation and Community Economic Development

This paper contributes to the immigration literature by generating two unique non-economic quality of life (QOL) indices and testing their role on recent migration patterns. Applying the generated QOL indices in conjunction with four independent welfare measures to an augmented gravity model of immigration, this paper finds an insignificant relationship between the six non-economic QOL measures and immigration flows for a panel of 16 OECD countries from 1991 to 2000. However, the results suggest that other factors such as the stock of immigrants from the source country already living in the OECD destination country, population size, relative incomes, and geographic factors all significantly drive the flow of immigration for the sample tested.