Why do some (better) alternatives to GDP get picked up, while others sink without trace? Useful new study on political economy of indicators.

Took me a while to overcome my reluctance to read a document subtitled ‘Deliverable 1.1’ on the front page (yuk), but I’m glad I did so. The paper ‘Review report on Beyond GDP indicators: categorisation, intentions and impacts’ (cracking title too…..) is published by BRAINPOoL – ‘Bringing Alternative Indicators into Policy’ (is that the sound of teeth grinding?).  The authors come from Eurothinktanks CUEC (Czech Republic) and the new economics foundation (UK).

But enough of the snark, because the paper is really good. Rather than add yet another indicator to the smorgasbord of measures that go ‘beyond GDP’, it tries to understand why some of these indicators get picked up, while others sink without trace. Asking the right question, as Einstein said, is a lot more than half the battle.

The researchers sought to answer that question with a mix of desk research, interviews with indicator nerds, and media analysis. First they tried to categorize the ever-growing list of alternative indicators. They came up with:

• Level of impact – international, national, local
• Indicator domains – environmental, social, economic
• Indicator approaches – subjective, objective
• Indicator types – single indicator, set/dashboard, aggregated, composite
• Envisaged users – politicians/policy makers, public, experts
• Link to GDP – adjusting GDP, “replacing” GDP, supplementing GDP

Media analysis showed that single figure indicators get far more pick up than complex dashboards, as do those that enshrine ‘simple and meaningful concepts’ like the Human Development Index or Ecological Footprint, which lead the pack by some way (see chart).

But a media splash, while useful, is not the main purpose of the indicators studied, which was overwhelmingly to influence policy. When have they achieved it and why?

• The most basic influences noted were transmission to or reference by a decision maker.
• The next step up from this is use of Beyond GDP indicators in assessment. Examples of this include GPI, ISEW and QUARS being integrated into regional or local official assessment frameworks in the US, UK and Italy. Also noteworthy is the Ecological Footprint being used to set environmental impact targets in several national governments.

• Actual policy changes connected to indicators were also reported. These include (i) the implementation of schemes to improve habitat for farmland birds after changes to the UK Defra Sustainable Development Indicator set (ii) the investment of $15 billion by the UAE government to develop alternative energy sources spurred on by a poor ranking in the Ecological Footprint.
• The most prolific successes, however, were achieved by local level indicators, perhaps because the distance between producer and user of the indicators is much smaller, making it easier to achieve a better ‘fit’ while also achieving legitimacy and relevance. For example, the Jacksonville Community Council Indicators are believed to have been instrumental in reducing infant mortality rates, recidivism and water pollution in the area. The Council of Europe SPIRAL project, meanwhile, achieved change to the delivery of food relief in France and the transformation of the approach to homelessness in Belgium.

And what lessons did the authors draw from all this?

“Indicators were successful when they had real relevance for policy makers. Crucially they need to measure something that policy makers believe they can influence. Subjective well-being indicators when used incorrectly can appear to fail this test, which explains efforts to build the evidence base for how policy can influence wellbeing. Another factor here is cost. In the current climate, indicators that provide clues for low cost policies, or indeed those that can help save money, are of particular interest.

Salience for a broader audience is also crucial and entails the elements of simplicity, understandability and good communication. Initiatives are effective when they allow one to produce a simple and attractive message that relates a meaningful concept. Using communications experts and avoiding taboo words were also identified as being important.

Indicators need credibility and legitimacy. Aside from the requirement of quality data, the appearance of neutrality was seen as the best route to achieve this with some interviewees comparing advocacy organisations’ data unfavourably with that of National Statistical Offices.

Developing the indicators with the audiences at whom they are targeted and/or encouraging participation (in the way that the Jacksonville Community Council Indicators initiative has done) is also seen as a key success factor. The importance of relationship-building also applies to policy makers with most initiatives that had achieved policy success citing direct face-to-face channels as vital.

Several barriers to the success of Beyond GDP indicators have also been identified. The economic crisis was viewed by many interviewees as a challenge for this agenda as it has moved the policy focus. Ideology and vested interests are also noted barriers with subjective well-being and composite indicators receiving strong resistance from those with libertarian or right of centre political views.”

Not sure I buy that last point – isn’t a crisis just as likely to create opportunities for adoption of new indicators, especially if the failings of existing indicators are seen as partly responsible for the crisis? I remember being struck by a presentation from the South Korean statistics office (I really do have all the fun), arguing that Korea was adopting a new quality of life index, based on over 100 objective and subjective indicators of wellbeing, because GDP was incapable of explaining why an ‘economic miracle’ like Korea had the highest suicide rate and the lowest birth rate in the OECD. Failure is a great source of innovation.

The Brainpool project continues and is worth following (especially if they ditch the naff titles). Oxfam is getting involved, working with nef in Brazil and India to explore likely reactions by politicians and voters to possible indicators. It will build on Oxfam Scotland’s Humankind Index, which was an earlier foray into this field. I hope the research includes applying a more serious power analysis to the findings in this report: what fractions of the state, private sector, political class or popular movements adopt new indicators, either individually, or in coalition with others? When and why? That could get very interesting.

Joe Stiglitz addresses ‘the movement’ on well-being v GDP

I’m still surrounded by the world’s statisticians (not as bad as it sounds) at the OECD Measuring the Progress of Societies conference in South Korea, where yesterday Joe Stiglitz gave a great presentation. Rather than simply rehearse the findings of his commission’s report to President Sarkozy, he reflected on why criticisms of GDP, which have been around for almost as long as GDP itself, have recently gone mainstream (see previous blog) – quite striking hearing him address a room full of besuited number crunchers as ‘this movement’.

First and most obviously, is the crisis (’crisis is the mother of statistics’ as Korea’s rep to the OECD observed earlier in the conference): booming GDP numbers in 2005-7 were based largely on the escalating profits of the financial sector, which were ‘fictitious – a mirage’. Ditto counting as genuine profits from the real estate bubble.

GDP ignores the growing concerns over financial sustainability, i.e. the level of debt (one of the more innovative features of the Stiglitz Commission’s report is the way it calls for the inclusion in our metrics of different aspects of sustainability, not just environmental.)

Climate change has highlighted how distorted prices become when you effectively put a zero price on carbon. This has led to a ‘carbon bubble’, which must now burst through including carbon prices in economic decision making.

Globalization makes GDP seem rather parochial, because it measures output according to place, rather than who benefits. In Stiglitz’s words: ‘if a foreign transnational opens a mine, takes away the minerals, pollutes the environment, damages people’s health and pays no taxes, if you focus on GDP would say the mine’s a good thing.’ Using Gross National Product instead would help correct this bias.

The growing share of government in the economy is misread by GDP, which ignores productivity improvements because it measures government inputs (eg health spending) not outputs. So US health spending of 17% of GDP v 11% in France does not reflect the fact that the health system is actually better in France. Correcting this single anomaly removes a third of the GDP difference between the two countries, questioning whether the US is doing ‘better’ than France in any real sense.

GDP growth is increasingly based on improvements in quality (rather than quantity) of products. Imputing values to improvements in quality is much less reliable, and so introduces more questionmarks.

Politicians like Sarkozy are keenly aware that the metrics are not consistent with what people feel. That leads to a ‘dangerous distrust of government’. A number of speakers have echoed this sentiment – statisticians worry about the political impact of their work on the ‘social contract’ between citizen and state.

Rising inequality means that the boom in wealth of a tiny proportion of the richest people raises the average, while most people see no benefit (in the language of the conference, medians and averages diverge).

On the positive side, improvements in research and our understanding and measurement of well-being provides more robust alternatives to GDP.

What are the implications?

Political impact: Stiglitz pointed to what amounts to pre-crisis GDP envy– Europeans admiring deceptive US GDP numbers and so calling for a shift to the anglosaxon model of deregulation.

Moreover, a better measure of economic performance would remove many of the false choices that bedevil public debate – eg protect the environment v maximise GDP growth. If GDP includes environmental degradation, you can get over the current polarization of the ‘limits to growth’ discussion.

Economic impact: The economics profession runs endless regressions to determine what factors lead to GDP growth. But if GDP is misleading, so will be the policy conclusions from such regressions, eg because of the faulty measurement of public sector activity, regressions usually find that a smaller public sector is good for growth.

Interesting stuff. Everyone here shares the view that we have reached some kind of tipping point on the need to measure well-being. And these are hard-boiled chief statisticians, not tree huggers. Whether they can do so in a way that actually gets the attention of the politicians is a different issue, and a subject for tomorrow’s blog. Off to listen to Richard Layard now.

3 minute conference youtube including interview with Stiglitz below

How could we measure well-being in a crisis? Some thoughts from Korea

I am currently in Korea’s second city, Busan, attending a big OECD conference on ‘statistics, knowledge and policy’, organized by its ‘Measuring the Progress of Societies’ project. The massive conference centre looks out on a consumerist paradise, including a giant Tesco’s supermarket (everything’s big here, giving you that sense of suddenly having shrunk that you get in Tiananmen square) and what declares itself to be the world’s biggest department store, complete with ice rink, spa etc, so perhaps it’s an appropriate setting to talk about what matters in terms of human wellbeing, and how to measure it.

Yesterday was the first day of three, but it’s already got me thinking about the tensions between efforts to fill 3 gaps in our knowledge

-         a more holistic understanding of well-being, including issues such as happiness and environmental sustainability, that remedies some of the failings of GDP (the cartoons offer two opposed versions of that story)

-         the need for real time or ‘high frequency’ data on what is happening in poor countries when crises hit. The current crisis has revealed a remarkable gap in our ability to find out fast what is happening to poor people when a shock hits.

-         the weak statistical systems of many low income countries

The Stiglitz Commission recently reported back to President Sarkozy (see previous blog) with recommendations that were essentially pretty complex: it’s futile to try and replace GDP with another single indicator. Instead, what we need is dashboards of dozens of indicators, from which people can construct composites that capture what they want to measure (human security, safety, material well-being, health etc).

Well fine, but that militates against sorting out gaps 2 and 3. You can’t collect high frequency data on dozens of issues, and in any case low income countries struggle to meet even current data requirements. 

So my question is ‘given weak statistical capacity, is there any one thing we could measure easily and at regular intervals (eg monthly) that would give a better guide than GDP to the state of well-being in a poor country?’ Frances Stewart of Oxford University and Vikram Nehru from the World Bank East Asia team suggested infant mortality rates (too complicated and unreliable for high frequency collection), or self-reported life satisfaction (‘are you happy?’). Others suggested physical security (‘do you feel safe?)’ or access to services such as healthcare. Any other candidates?

Frances reckons that it might be worth some NGOs getting together and piloting these – if we’d had them in place as the global crisis spread to the poorest countries, what would they have shown? Worth thinking about…..

The conference is being webcast Wednesday and Thursday here

Do we need to ration growth, and if so, who gets what’s left?

Spoke at a Quaker conference on the ‘zero growth economy’ at the weekend. Quaker meetings are different: when I finished speaking to an audience of 350 people, there was total hear-a-pin-drop silence. Instead of clapping, people reflect, eyes closed, on what they have just heard. And no, even though it was after lunch, they weren’t asleep (well, most of them) and it wasn’t just me – the next speaker got the same treatment, despite beginning his talk by acting out the train-wreck metaphor, ending with him running into a closed door at full speed and slumping to the ground. The two pigeons flying round the hall just added to the sense that this was not an average meeting. Actually, I really enjoyed it – free from all the rigmarole of applause, the quiet, dignified exchange and moments of shared silence felt respectful, even intimate. Plus Quakers are great readers – the stock of From Poverty to Power sold out in seconds and I spent the rest of the afternoon kicking myself for not bring more.

As for the discussion, the audience was deeply anti-materialist and apocalyptic (trainwreck man – ‘we are moving into the dying time – the 21st Century will be like working in a planetary hospice’), so I was forced first to defend the importance of growth to poor countries, then talk about whether it needs to be rationed to stay within the limits of climate change. The argument is best illustrated with three country scatter plots:

1. Rate of poverty reduction v growth: 3 points to note: firstly that on average, countries that grow faster see greater poverty reduction. Secondly there is a lot of variation above and below the line of best fit, showing that you can get a lot more/fewer poverty bangs for your growth buck depending on the quality of growth (levels of equality, labour intensity, effectiveness of government redistribution and so on). Thirdly, you need 2% growth before you even get into poverty reduction (zero growth corresponds to a 1% increase in poverty rates).

2. Carbon intensity and overall carbon emissions: global carbon intensity (grammes of carbon per $ of economic output – the blue line) has been improving steadily for decades, but the rate of improvemement is much lower than that of the long term growth trend of GDP. Also, it got stuck around 2000, presumably due to the relative rise of carbon-heavy Chinese production. As a result overall global emissions (the red line) continue to rise, and are even accelerating. That leaves 3 options if we want to stay within two degrees of warming:
a) a drastic improvement in the next few years of the rate of fall of the blue line
b) reduced global GDP
c) a geoengineering magic bullet (a variety of Dr Strangelove solutions like putting tinfoil in orbit to reflect away sunlight, likely to have all sorts of unintended side effects)

Politicians are desperately clinging to (a), but I don’t see convincing evidence that carbon intensity is likely to fall at the speed required, which leaves a real need to at least consider (b), still an almost complete taboo in government circles. But if we are going to reduce the rate of global growth, how do we decide who gets what? Time to click on chart 3.

3. Life satisfaction v GDP: what this shows is that in poor countries, growth leads to a sharp improvement in people’s reported quality of life. Not surprisingly, being able to feed your family, increase your resilience to sudden shocks like sickness or unemployment, and watch your children grow up healthy and educated makes people happier. But above $20,000 or so (Czech Republic or South Korea), growth no longer adds to happiness.  In fact if you believe life satisfaction surveys in the UK, gross national happiness in my country peaked in the long hot summer of 1976, (ah yes, I remember it well) and has been falling ever since, despite considerable subsequent growth in the British economy.

So there you have it: if you want to maximise happiness (a utilitarian argument which offends the rights-based people, I know, but not a bad start) AND prevent catastrophic global warming, you need to make sure that incomes rise in the poor countries, but are steady or falling in the rich ones. i.e. we need to ration growth – it’s just too precious (and dirty) to waste on the rich countries. Convinced?

However, I suspect that such arguments were excessively rationalist for some in the audience (although there is a Quakernomics blog if you’re interested). Much of the discussion revolved around the role of believers who are neither lobbyists nor scientists. It came down to changing attitudes and beliefs to prepare the ground for more fundamental shifts : ‘We Quakers are being called to be the midwives of a new style of living and being’ one said. Recalling the history of the Quaker-led abolition of slavery, I wouldn’t bet against them achieving something significant. Trainwreck man Alistair McIntosh ended with the words of poet Adrienne Rich:

‘My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.’

Update: train wreck man has now written his own account of the event in the Guardian 

GDP v Well-being – the Stiglitz Commission and other news

According to Otto von Bismarck, the father of modern Germany, ‘Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.’ Having skimmed the report of the ‘The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress’, commissioned by President Sarkozy and released last week, I would say GDP (Gross Domestic Product, the standard measure of a country’s economic performance) is right up there alongside laws and sausages – it’s pretty unsavoury.

The Commission, chaired by Joe Stiglitz, first picks over the shortcomings of GDP, and argues that ‘those attempting to guide the economy and our societies are like pilots trying to steering a course without a reliable compass’. It then discusses how to a) improve GDP within its current definition, b) measure quality of life and c) measure sustainability. The report is not for the fainthearted – a 12 page executive summary, a 64 page ‘short narrative’, and a full 200 page set of ‘substantial arguments’. There are also some shorter, rather more accessible coverage in the Guardian, The Economist and Financial Times, among others, and op-eds by Stiglitz. Here are some excerpts from the exec sum, and some thoughts of my own at the end and in square brackets. It’s a long post, but a lot shorter than the original!

[Why we need better measures of services, the quality (rather than quantity) of goods and government activity]
‘The time has come to adapt our system of measurement of economic activity to better reflect the structural changes which have characterized the evolution of modern economies. In effect, the growing share of services and the production of increasingly complex products make the measurement of output and economic performance more difficult than in the past.

In some countries and some sectors, increasing “output” is more a matter of an increase in the quality of goods produced and consumed than in the quantity. Capturing quality change is a tremendous challenge, yet this is vital.

Governments play an important part in today’s economies. They provide services of a “collective” nature, such as security, and of a more “individual” nature, such as medical services and education. These services tend to be large in scale, and have increased considerably since World War II, but, in many cases, they remain badly measured. Traditionally, measures have been based on the inputs used to produce these services (such as the number of doctors) rather than on the actual outputs produced (such as the number of particular medical treatments).

Because outputs are taken to move in tandem with inputs, productivity change in the provision of these services is ignored [see graph for an example from Denmark]. It is thus important to come to grips with measuring government output.

[It's better to measure income/consumption and wealth, not just production]
There appears to be an increasing gap between the information contained in aggregate GDP data and what counts for common people’s well-being. Because no single measure can summarize something as complex as the well-being of the members of society, our system of measurement must encompass a range of different measures [through a] broad statistical system that captures as many of the relevant dimensions as possible:

When evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production [as currently, with GDP]. The available national accounts data shows that in a number of OECD countries real household income has grown quite differently from real GDP per capita, and typically at a lower rate [see bar chart].

Income and consumption are crucial for assessing living standards, but in the end they can only be gauged in conjunction with information on wealth. A household that spends its wealth on consumption goods increases its current well-being but at the expense of its future well-being. Measures of wealth are central to measuring sustainability. What is carried over into the future necessarily has to be expressed as stocks – of physical, natural, human and social capital.

[Broaden income measures to non-market activities like leisure and raising families]
There have been major changes in how households and society function. For example, many of the services people received from other family members in the past are now purchased on the market. This shift translates into a rise in income as measured in the national accounts and may give a false impression of a change in living standards, while it merely reflects a shift from non-market to market provision of services…. [We need to] start with information on how people spend their time [including leisure, though putting a value on it is particularly difficult]

Well-being is multi-dimensional
The following key dimensions should be taken into account:
i. Material living standards (income, consumption and wealth);
ii. Health;
iii. Education;
iv. Personal activities including work
v. Political voice and governance;
vi. Social connections and relationships;
vii. Environment (present and future conditions);
viii. Insecurity, of an economic as well as a physical nature.

Objective and subjective dimensions of well-being are both important
The information relevant to valuing quality of life goes beyond people’s self-reports and perceptions to include measures of their “functionings” and freedoms. In effect, what really matters are the capabilities of people, that is, the extent of their opportunity set and of their freedom to choose among this set, the life they value.[in case you were wondering, yes, Amartya Sen was on the Commission]

Inequalities in human conditions are integral to any assessment of quality of life

Inequalities in quality of life should be assessed across people, socio-economic groups, gender and generations, with special attention to inequalities that have arisen more recently, such as those linked to immigration.

It is possible to collect meaningful and reliable data on subjective as well as objective well-being.

Subjective well-being encompasses different aspects (cognitive evaluations of one’s life, happiness, satisfaction, positive emotions such as joy and pride, and negative emotions such as pain and worry)

Sustainability means measuring stocks, not just flows
Sustainability assessment requires a well-identified dashboard of indicators. The distinctive feature of the components of this dashboard should be that they are interpretable as variations of some underlying “stocks (quantities and qualities of natural resources, and of human, social and physical capital.)

There are two versions to the stock approach to sustainability. One version just looks at variations in each stock separately, assessing whether the stock is increasing or decreasing, with a view particularly to doing whatever is necessary to keep each above some critical threshold. The second version converts all these assets into a monetary equivalent.

[The Commission suggests] a more modest approach, i.e. focusing the monetary aggregation on items for which reasonable valuation techniques exist, such as physical capital, human capital and certain natural resources. In so doing, it should be possible to assess the “economic” component of sustainability, that is, whether or not countries are over-consuming their economic wealth.

The environmental aspects of sustainability deserve a separate follow-up based on a well-chosen set of physical indicators. In particular there is a need for a clear indicator of our proximity to dangerous levels of environmental damage (such as associated with climate change or the depletion of fishing stocks.)’

So will all this make a difference? After all, people have been bashing GDP for decades, but it has proven remarkably impervious to attack. I think there are reasons for both optimism and pessimism on the report’s impact.

Optimism both because of its (intellectual and physical) weight (several Nobel prizewinners, a Presidential commission and high quality analysis), and because it is part of a wider groundswell of calls for new ways of measuring social and economic performance. On 8 September the European Commission issued a communication entitled ‘GDP and beyond: Measuring progress in a changing world’, which argued that ‘there are no insuperable technical obstacles to developing the quality and scope of our indicators even further so that policy decisions can progressively be based on a more integrated, balanced and timely view of social, economic and environmental facts.’ The Commission announced that it ‘intends to develop a comprehensive environmental index and improve quality-of-life indicators’ for inclusion in both the European System of Accounts, and member states’ own national accounts systems. So these ideas are becoming reality in the statistical systems of a major chunk of the global economy. This promising combination of political momentum and technical innovation is also reflected in the OECD’s ‘Measuring the Progress of Societies’ project, which has a big conference in South Korea next month. I am speaking there, so expect an update.

Pessimism because the Commission comes out against a single alternative to GDP (probably rightly), and instead proposes various ‘dashboards’ of indicators that allow people to construct different composite indices (like the Human Development Index and dozens of others) for particular purposes. That’s fine if all parties can agree on the particular composite that best reflects a particular issue, but otherwise, everyone grabs the (different) indicators that best ‘prove’ their case, and the debate rapidly gets polarized and stuck. One of the reason’s for GDP’s remarkable durability is that the complexity of the alternatives and improvements frightens the life out of policy makers. Statistics wonks are just not good at KISS (‘keep it simple, stupid’).

Part of me still wishes people would take heed of the sign that Einstein had hanging over his desk at Princeton: ‘Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.’ But for the foreseeable future, policy makers will insist on metrics, and the rest of us should probably back Stiglitz, the OECD and the Commission in trying to ensure that they are as good a reflection of reality as possible.

Measuring wellbeing – the latest from UN and OECD. But can Costa Rica, Dominican Republic and Jamaica really be the world’s happiest countries?!

The criticisms of GDP as a pretty unreliable measure of well-being have been around for decades, but policy makers persist in using it as a proxy for success, in part because of the lack of credible alternatives. Now there’s an encouraging flurry of international activity at both the UN and OECD that seeks to fill the gap.

In October the OECD’s ‘Measuring the Progress of Societies’ project is holding its 3rd world conference in South Korea (for conference details see here, for previous blog, here). I’ll be attending along with thousands (well, hundreds) of statisticians. You can imagine my excitement.

Over at the UN, the Human Development Report, published by UNDP, has long been one of the most influential annual reports on development. Now, according to its director Jeni Klugman, ‘The HDR 2010 will take stock of 20 years of Human Development Reports and undertake a systematic examination of the evidence about trends in human development outcomes over two decades. This will go beyond the Human Development Index (HDI), and other related indices, to include inequality and broader aspects of poverty, agency and empowerment. It is well recognized that the HDI captures only a few people’s choices and leaves out many that people may value highly – economic, social and political freedom and protection against violence, insecurity and discrimination.’

According to Klugman, ‘The world has changed since 1990 and these changes, along with new data and research technology, should be reflected in measures of human development, poverty, and gender:
• There has been progress in people’s well being broadly defined.
• Ideas have advanced: for example, there is nowadays a consensus about the need for multidimensional responses to development challenges and a wider acceptance of Sen’s ideas on capabilities, functionings and freedoms but practice lacks behind.
• HDI is a minimalist measure of development, but the challenge is to take measurement beyond the HDI.
• New opportunities to enhance human development have emerged, such as channels for democratic activity and participation, including global participation, information technology, cooperation around concrete goals such as the MDGs, and institutional reforms at various levels.
• Conversely, new or renewed challenges to human development progress have emerged related to: deprivation traps, inequality, natural and man-made disasters, conflict, and environmental degradation.
 
Although these patterns have already highlighted key candidates for adjustments to the HDI, such as inequality and environmental sustainability, complementary measures are also important, including a new poverty measure and justice and freedom indicators.’

So the HDR team are open for suggestions on the following questions:

1.          In your country or region, have human development indices (HDI, HPI, GDI, GEM) been instrumental to promote a multidisciplinary approach to development issues beyond the economic dimension? Can you provide concrete examples?
2.          What are the main challenges in promoting human development measurement in the development debate within your country or region?
3.          Being aware that human development and poverty are much more than what the HDI or HPI measure, and bearing in mind alternative national instruments, how could the these indices best be enhanced to reflect the ‘state of the art’ insights and techniques, globally and at the national level?
4.          Acknowledging that steering analysis, reflection and action, and not ranking countries, is the main purpose of the yearly calculation of the HDI, what could be alternative ways to present the HDI or other alternative indices?
5.          Your views on how justice, respect for human rights and freedom of choice may be measured are encouraged. Can they be integrated into a general development index such as the HDI, or should a separate index on these issues be considered?

For further reading, visit the HDR website. If you want to get involved, sign up by emailing hdr-net@groups.undp.org (or have a look at the HDRnet webpage).

And meanwhile, according to the New Economics Foundation’s ‘Happy Planet Index’, which combines reported life satisfaction, life expectancy and ecological footprint, the world’s happiest country is Costa Rica, followed by Dominican Republic and Jamaica (see chart for regional breakdown). Eh? Now even as a proud Latin Americanist, that’s what I call (when I’m being polite) ‘counter-intuitive’…… For an interactive map go here.