This paper reports on work undertaken within the Statistics Directorate to measure the value of household production of non-market services, in order to better compare material well-being across countries. The work is being conducted under the aegis of the National Accounts Working Party and as...

Over the last three decades, a number of frameworks have been developed to promote and measure well-being, quality of life, human development and sustainable development. Some frameworks use a conceptual approach while others employ a consultative approach, and different initiatives to measure...

In recent years entrepreneurship has become a buzzword that?s entered the mainstream. Politicians continuously cite its importance and the need to create more entrepreneurial societies, and newspapers and television programmes frequently create themes around successful entrepreneurs. But, the...

This Handbook aims to provide a guide for constructing and using composite indicators for policy makers, academics, the media and other interested parties. While there are several types of composite indicators, this Handbook is concerned with those which compare and rank country performance in...

This working paper has been written as a contribution to the OECD e-government project launched in 2001, which explores how governments can best exploit information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance good governance principles and achieve public policy goals. The paper highlights...

This paper sets out definitions of the entrepreneur, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activity for the purpose of supporting the development of related indicators. The paper recognises the long history in this area and the contention and differences that have existed, and that continue to...

This statistical working paper is the exact copy of the report of the joint OECD/Eurostat task force that was presented at the October 2002 OECD National Accounts Expert Meeting. The report confirms that current estimates of software investment differ significantly between countries for pure...

Services are increasingly important in modern economies contributing about 68% of world economy value added in 2002 and, although at a much lower level, are increasingly traded internationally (see Table 1). These patterns of increasing importance of services are observed in the generality of...

This paper examines how measurement problems affect international comparisons of labour productivity. It suggests that these measurement problems do not significantly affect the assessment of aggregate productivity patterns in the OECD area. However, these problems do influence the more detailed...

This paper presents a general overview of recent work on sustainable development indicators in OECD countries. It provides an overview of on-going work for developing “agreed” indicators that measure progress across the three dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social and...