The Last Mile in Analyzing Wellbeing and Poverty: Indices of Social Development

Abstract

Development practitioners worldwide increasingly recognize the importance of informal institutions—such as norms of cooperation, non-discrimination, or the role of community oversight in the management of investment activities—in affecting well-being, poverty, and even economic growth. There has been little empirical analysis that tests these relationships at the international level. This is largely due to data limitations: few reliable, globally representative data sources exist that can provide a basis for cross-country comparison of social norms and practice, social trust, and community engagement. The International Institute of Social Studies now hosts a large database of social development indicators compiled from a wide range of sources in a first attempt to overcome such data constraints, at a low cost (http://www.IndSocDev.org). The Indices of Social Development are based on over 200 measures from 25 reputable data sources for the years 1990 to 2010.These measures are aggregated into six composite indices: civic activism, interpersonal safety and trust, inter-group cohesion, clubs and associations, gender equality, and inclusion of minorities. Not all data sources provide observations for indicators in each country, but together these data sources allow for comprehensive estimates of social behavior and norms of interaction across a broad range of societies, and increasingly with possibilities to track changes over time. This paper presents the database, highlights the differences, similarities, and complementarities with other measures of well-being, including those around income poverty, multidimensional poverty, and human development.

Keywords::

• measurement
• social development
• well-being
• indicators

Notes

¹ ISS will continuously expand the power of the database by including new data and variables and by developing new techniques to integrate, enrich, and analyze the data, and further under-build this theoretically, to make the best possible use of this rich dataset.

² The paper was presented at the OECD conference on Social Cohesion and Development in Paris, January 2011 and at the DSA/EADI conference in York, September 20110. Comments of participants have been very useful for this paper. Errors remain ours.

³ A few years back, poverty estimates were revised following the availability of new (internationally comparable) price data; these led to huge changes in estimates, for example in East Asia.

⁴ See, for example, the work by the (Sarkozy) Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.

⁵ Other measures in this category include the Physical Quality of Life Index, the Basic Needs Approach, the Happiness index in Bhutan, the new Below Poverty Line (BPL) measures in India, and a range of other country examples (see Alkire & Sarwar 2009). See Gasper et al. (2008) for description of concepts of human security and social quality.

⁶http://www.govindicators.org. Other projects in this category include the Corruption Perceptions Index (http://www.transparencia.pt/imprensa/files/2010/10/CPI2010_methodology_brief.pdf), the Doing Business Project, the Ibrahim Index of African Governance.

⁷ For a description of its evolvement within the World Bank, see Bebbington et al. (2006) and Davis (2004) with respect to the notion of social capital.

⁸http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/EXTCDD/0,menuPK:430167∼pagePK:149018∼piPK:149093∼theSitePK:430161,00.html

⁹ See discussions in Dani and de Haan (2008), Deacon (2005), de Haan (2010), Mkandawire (2004) and Moser (1992).

¹⁰ Da Silva and Sum (2008); Fumo et al. (2000).

¹¹ See, for example, a discussion and material on mainstreaming in transport investments; http://go.worldbank.org/M5RZXHZON0.

¹² Easterly et al. (2006), Narayan and Cassidy (2001), Woolcock and Narayan (2000) with respect to social cohesion.

¹³ Fine (2004), van Staveren and Knorringa (2008). The use of the terminology ‘capital’ and ability to define this as individual characteristic were probably amongst the reasons this found currency in the debate, while a notion of social exclusion, for example, did not obtain such popularity.

¹⁴ In 1997, Knack and Keefer where amongst the first to show the impact of trust and economic growth. The interest in development studies built on work in OECD countries, notably by Coleman and Putnam.

¹⁵ The tables generated also include the standard error, as an easy means to assess the quality of data produced.

¹⁶ Which they illustrate with reference to three African countries. They also show the correlation between the different indices (Dulal & Foa 2011: Table 1), which shows a particularly strong difference in the clubs and associations index (also Huang 2011); this, and the advantages and disadvantages of combing in Indices deserve further exploration.

¹⁷ The negative impact of civic activism may highlight there are different types of civic activism contained within ISD.

¹⁸ Huang's (2011) analysis, which was presented after this paper was drafted, confirms that both indices have shown patterns of decline and/or divergence.

¹⁹ This analysis may be particularly challenging, for at least three reasons: measures of inequality change relatively slowly (certainly compared to GDP figures), perception of inequality and ‘objective’ measures like a Gini coefficient are not necessarily the same, and perception of ‘acceptable’ inequality vary across countries and times.

²⁰ Not yet included was data from the Gallup World Poll, which has questions on ethnic, religious, and inclusion of Migrants.

²¹ A recent issue of World Development has important contributions to this debate (Kanbur et al.2011).

²² For example, to base this in work on durable inequalities by Tilly (1998).

²³ As demonstrated by Dvora Yanow at ISS on 6 December 2010; http://www.iss.nl/News/Events/Development-Research-Seminar-Dvora-Yanow.

²⁴http://www.iss.nl/News/Events/Development-Research-Seminar-Betty-de-Hart

²⁵ This directly poses an empirically question, about correlation between the indices of inter-personal and inter-group cohesion.

²⁶http://www.iss.nl/News/Events/Significant-Difference-Opening-Seminar-DRS-Autumn-2010