Business Times 17 Jun 11;
LATE last month, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its first-ever Your Better Life Index - a tool that's part of a larger initiative to gauge the well-being and progress of society in its 34 member countries, and just the latest in a long series of efforts by economists to tackle the issue of tracking national development and progress beyond the economic numbers driven by the traditional GDP yardstick.
Like other such initiatives, the OECD's Better Life Index is a composite of socio-economic factors - specifically, 11 areas that the Paris-based think tank deems to be 'essential' to well-being in terms of material living conditions (housing, income, jobs) and quality of life (community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance).
What's different is that the OECD index is not a static rating system that produces a ranking of 'best' to 'worst' country on a fixed weightage of the various criteria. It's interactive in that it allows the user to put different weights on each of the 11 topics that make for a better life, and therefore to decide for oneself what contributes most to well-being. While money may not buy happiness, it is an important means to achieving higher living standards and thus greater well-being, the OECD says in its preamble on the 'income' factor, adding that 'higher economic wealth may also improve access to quality education, healthcare and housing'. And so those who consider material wealth to be, by far, still the most important determinant of what makes a society tick and a country great might assign a maximum weighting of five to 'income' and zero to everything else. By this measure, Luxembourg emerges solidly on top, well above everyone else, followed by the United States, Canada, Switzerland and Australia.
But if somewhat more subjective criteria such as 'life satisfaction', 'community' and 'work-life balance' are your top interests and priorities, it's the Scandinavians - the Danes and Swedes, in particular - and Canadians with the 'best life' while the Americans are down at 15th. The index, of course, does not capture everything that people would conceivably deem to be essential to a good life (such as childbearing, civil rights, religion, perhaps); it doesn't include even the growing challenge of social inequality - shortcomings which the OECD hopes to address over time. But it is an interesting tool with potential to help deliver better policy-making or even to just guide debate and self-assessment among each country's citizenry about what they desire as their personal and collective national 'quality of life' goals - for non-OECD countries as well, not least Singapore.
While the GDP measure is in no danger of being supplanted anywhere anytime soon, it's clear that GDP doesn't capture all, or even most, aspects of what makes people satisfied with their lot in life. It'll make for more than an interesting academic exercise if economists here adapt and produce an OECD Better Life Index for Singapore, adding to the ongoing debate about policymaking and society here.
