Towards the end of next month, Korea will play host to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Third World Forum, which among other things will seek to find ways to measure economic development and social progress in OECD member countries and the world at large.
According to a press release from Statistics Korea, which is planning the event, this forum will be used as a global platform to identify the new paradigm of social progress going “beyond GDP,” and to discuss how to develop new indicators for measuring the progress and how to facilitate those indicators in making policies. It will also address such issues as quality of life and climate change.
Five years ago, recognizing that the statistics which measure economic performance and the means used to gather such data did not give a real indication as to people’s well-being, the OECD launched a global project called ‘Measuring the Progress of Society.’ Research has revealed the fallacy in the assumption that economic growth in a country means life in that country is improving.
The fact is that many people in countries where high economic growth exists are no happier now than when their GDP was lower. It has also been established that in fact people now trust each other and their governments less than they used to; they have longer working hours and while this translates to increased income, there is also more insecurity and complexity in their lives. And while people are living longer and healthier lives than their immediate ancestors, the answer to whether life is actually improving or if society is making progress is not as straightforward as it should be.
In many OECD countries people have indicated that environmental issues such as climate change have placed a great deal of uncertainty on future well-being. In this region, particularly Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago crime and political instability would have to be added to the list.
As regards Guyana, while new roads, bridges, hospitals and schools are fine and are necessary, one wonders indeed, how claims of progress and development can be made when on the other hand citizens are bombarded in their homes day and night by noise, foul odours and criminals?
Is it progress when the capital city can easily fit the description of the Dungle from Orlando Patterson’s Children of Sisyphus.
And regardless of what the GDP is, can anyone live comfortably when murder appears to be by far the chosen method of settling disputes, as evidenced by Tuesday’s grisly acid throwing and hacking to death of a fireman at Land of Canaan?
OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría points to what he calls “a growing gap between what official statistics tell us about our economies and how people see the conditions in which they live their daily lives.” He said this gap can be “clearly damaging both to the credibility of political debate and action and to the very functioning of democracy in our countries.”
Social progress then evidently must marry upward economic development with a concomitant rise in the quality of life and values of a society. If the two can’t move forward together then we are really just kidding ourselves. Aren’t we?
