The paper reviews some national initiatives related to measuring the stock of human capital, indentifies some challenges to be addressed to improve the quality of existing monetary measures of human capital, and suggests developing experimental satellite accounts for education to better...

This report provides information on an OECD Project examining the feasibility of producing reliable international comparative measures of the culture sector. As part of the project, initial measures were produced for five countries and four cities. A draft version of this paper was circulated in...

There is a broad recognition that the development of cross-cutting, high-quality, shared, and accessible information about a society’s progress is crucial to ensure that decision-making is simultaneously responsive and responsible at all levels. There is no single correct way to manage a...

Every house is different. It is important that house price indexes take account of these quality differences. Hedonic methods which express house prices as a function of a vector of characteristics (such as number of bedrooms and bathrooms, land area and location) are particularly useful for...

Valuable information exists already on household economic resources. The national accounts provide aggregate measures and micro sources (surveys, administrative records, and censuses) can be used to derive measures of the distribution across households groups. Over the years, however, macro and...

Much valuable information exists already on household economic resources (i.e. income, consumption and wealth). Indeed, the national accounts provide aggregate measures and micro sources (surveys, administrative records, and censuses) can be used to derive measures of the distribution across...

While environmental economics studies using stated life satisfaction data have been gaining attention, much of this body of work remains exploratory. In this study we contribute to this emerging body of research by combining OECD survey data from four European countries on life satisfaction and...

Following recommendations from the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (2009), this paper proposes the use of a new methodology to measure the joint distribution of households. income, consumption and wealth. Based on a multidimensional extension of the Atkinson generalized mean framework, the...

Since income is the return on wealth, the total wealth of any given country should be on the order of 20 times its GDP. Instead the average observed ratio from the balance sheet accounts of the System of National Accounts (SNA) is a factor of 2.6 to 6.6, depending on whether natural resource...

Housing is a core element of people’s material living standards. It is essential to meet basic needs, such as for shelter from weather conditions, and to offer a sense of personal security, privacy and personal space. Good housing conditions are also essential for people’s health and affect...