OECD Better Life Index

[1][2] The platform consists of a dashboard, that provides data and insights into key indicators - measuring areas such as wellbeing, environmental quality, quality of public services and security - alongside an interactive tool Your Better Life Index (BLI),[3] which encourages citizens to create their own indexes by ranking each of the indicators according to the importance in their lives.

[4] This initiative began in 2011 in line with the recommendations of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, also known as the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, whose recommendations sought to address concerns that standard macroeconomic statistics like GDP failed to give a true account of people's current and future well-being.

The 'beyond growth' approach to economic progress is relatively new and the OECD Better Life Initiative promotes the co-production of what we might standardise by facilitating conversation between the public and policymakers.

[7] Each of the 11 topics is made up of 1-4 indices and these are fine-tuned over time as insights are derived from data collected in previous years.

The tool shows countries ranked in a chart where each of the nations is represented by a flower, and each of the topics is a petal, where its size is defined by its score in that area.

Legend: The fourth edition of How's Life was released in 2020; all reports can be viewed online using the OECD Library.

The report highlights differences in gender, age, education and between the top and bottom performers of well-being outcomes.

Higher levels of wellbeing are seen in those countries having higher levels of equality[12] From an econometric point of view, the Index seems similar to other efforts aimed at substituting or complementing the gross domestic product (GDP) measure by an econometric model for measuring the happiness and well-being of the population.

Observers argue that "the 11 dimensions still cannot fully capture what is truly important to a populace, such as social networks that sustain relationships, and freedom of speech.".

[14] Various critics have pointed out that the OECD's BLI does not include such dimensions as poverty, economic inequality, access to health insurance and healthcare, environmental and air pollution.

[citation needed] In 2012 OECD relaunched "with new indicators on inequality and gender plus rankings for Brazil and Russia.

[16] The insights provided by user inputs into the platform have been praised to effectively depict collective citizen definitions of well-being.

[17] The initiative and index has gone some way to moving the public debate, though the platform is not well advertised and does not appear in the top results of web searches for similar tools [18] As increases in inequality and climate change force us to reconsider our ideas of growth and progress the OECD Better Life Index may become more mainstream.