The OECD Better Life Index is an interactive composite index that aggregates average measures of country’s well-being outcomes through weights defined by users. This paper studies these weights by analysing the responses given by close to 130 000 users since 2011 to date. The paper has three...

We compute a distribution-adjusted welfare measure that aggregates outcomes in three dimensions of well-being, namely income, employment and longevity. Aggregation weights reflect preferences of people on these dimensions. The welfare measure is calculated for 26 OECD countries and selected...

Societal progress is about improvements in the well-being of people and households. Assessing such progress requires looking at the diverse and multidimensional experiences and living conditions of people. Measuring well-being and progress is a key priority that the OECD is pursuing through its...

The paper provides a first assessment of the range of governance statistics that are available in OECD countries, reaching three main conclusions. First, while several statistics relating to various aspects of governance are already available, they differ in terms of the underlying concepts, the...

The last decade has seen a sustained surge of interest in measures of subjective well-being on the part of economists and other social scientists. The vast majority of the academic literature on subjective well-being focuses on measures of life evaluation, as does most discussion of how measures...

Businesses have a significant impact on people’s economic and social conditions, as well as on environmental outcomes. This paper presents an overview of the various kinds of initiatives aimed at measuring or reporting on business’ impact, or certain aspects of it. It shows that despite the...

This paper describes development patterns beyond GDP in a long-term historical perspective. It revisits the discussion on the goals of development in light of the current discussions on ‘Beyond GDP’, provides evidence on GDP and well-being outcomes since 1820 in a broad range of developing...

The Better Life Index was introduced by the OECD as a tool to chart the multi-dimensional well-being of OECD member countries, Brazil and the Russian Federation. However, the Better Life Index relies only on aggregate country-level indicators, and hence is insensitive to how multi-dimensional...