The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi-Report: Old Wine in New Skins? Views from a Social Indicators Perspective

The recently published report by the “Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” is being discussed and commented from the point of view of social indicators research, which addresses issues of the measurement of well-being and social progress since the 1960s. Some of the recommendations made by the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi—Report thus seem to be well known and all but new and innovative from a social indicators perspective. It is also argued that the report ignores some of the available approaches, instruments and ongoing activities to measure and monitor well-being and the quality of life, which go well beyond GDP, such as e.g. social reports. The Commission’s report is nevertheless considered a major step forward towards a considerably improved measurement of well-being and social progress.     

“A La Recherche Du” Quality of Life

This essay examines the stages of inquiry when we seek to formulate quality of life in an era before our own. There arises the question of the extent to which today’s formulation of quality of life can be applied to an era far removed from our own. Implicitly, there is the nature of the time interval, T₁···T_n, and the causal significance of intervening events. Data of a numerical sort can be hard to retrieve due to fires, wars, and mishandling. Quantitative data can be found in censuses and military records. Information in its raw form is referred to here as protodata. Figure 1 provides a schematic overview of the search for quality of life by subjective and objective modes of inquiry.     

The Short-Term Impact of Involuntary Migration in China’s Three Gorges: A Prospective Study

The aim of this study is to measure the short-term impact of involuntary migration resulting from China’s Three Gorges Dam project on the 1.3 million persons being displaced. We focus on the social, economic, and mental and physical health impact using three sets of indicators. Using a prospective research design, we gathered information about these indicators from a sample of migrants first before they moved and then again after they moved. Changes in the migrants’ wellbeing during the period, when benchmarked to corresponding changes computed for a control group of non-migrants, are attributed to the impact of involuntary migration. Our results showed that although the displaced have enjoyed a relative gain in housing quality, most of the changes were in the negative direction and many of such negative changes were statistically significant.     

Deprivation,Social Exclusion and Subjective Well-Being

This paper aims at investigating empirically the relationship between self-declared satisfaction with life and an individual’s well-being as measured by the indices of deprivation and social exclusion proposed in the income distribution literature. Results on European countries show that life satisfaction decreases with an increase in deprivation and exclusion after controlling for individual’s income, relative income and other influential factors in a multivariate setting.     

Penalized least absolute deviations estimation for nonlinear model with change-points

This paper studies the asymptotic properties of a smoothed least absolute deviations estimator in a nonlinear parametric model with multiple change-points occurring at the unknown times with independent and identically distributed errors. The model is nonlinear in the sense that between two successive change-points the regression function is nonlinear into respect to parameters. It is shown via Monte Carlo simulations that its performance is competitive with that of least absolute deviations estimator and it is more efficient than the least squares estimator, particularly in the presence of the outlier points. If the number of change-points is unknown, an estimation criterion for this number is proposed. Interest of this method is that the objective function is approximated by a differentiable function and if the model contains outliers, it detects correctly the location of the change-points.     

On the strong convergence for weighted sums of random variables

A strong convergence result is obtained for weighted sums of identically distributed negatively associated random variables which have a suitable moment condition. This result improves the result of Cai (Metrika 68:323–331, 2008).     

A note on the asymptotic distribution of a Perron-type innovational outlier unit root test with a break

This note provides the asymptotic distribution of a Perron-type innovational outlier unit root test developed by Popp (J Stat Comput Sim 78:1145–1161, 2008) in case of a shift in the intercept for non-trending data. In Popp (J Stat Comput Sim 78:1145–1161, 2008), only critical values for finite samples based on Monte Carlo techniques are tabulated. Using similar arguments as in Zivot and Andrews (J Bus Econ Stat 10:251–270, 1992), weak convergence is shown for the test statistics.     

Automatic estimation procedure in partial linear model with functional data

Partial linear modelling ideas have recently been adapted to situations when functional data are observed. This paper aims to complete the study of such model by proposing a fully automatic estimation procedure. This is achieved by constructing a data-driven method to choose the smoothing parameters entered in the nonparametric components of the model. The asymptotic optimality of the method is stated and its practical interest is illustrated on finite size Monte Carlo simulated samples.