Abstract
The Commission on the Measurement of Performance and Social Progress (Stiglitz et al. 2009) has usefully validated and, above all, given legitimacy to the various criticisms that have been made for several decades now of GDP and economic growth. What is a good society or a good territory? How is its quality of life or its well-being to be assessed? It once seemed that an economic approach to these questions, which are almost philosophical in nature, was broadly sufficient as a means of evaluating the dynamism of territories and, with even greater certainty, their quality. This consensus is being increasingly called into question as a result of a twofold pressure. There is a pressure exerted first by growing awareness of environmental issues, and, second, by increasingly heterogeneous populations. This heterogeneity leads to difficulties in adequately capturing living standards or well-being by ‘average’ measures (of income, consumption, wealth etc.), which have consequently lost some of their meaning (Stiglitz et al. 2009). They are increasingly being debated in international institutions (UNDP 2009; Giovannini et al. 2009), nations, territorial authorities (Jany-Catrice et al. 2009), and even municipalities (see eg. Bardet and Helluin 2010).
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- 1.
As is that of the meaning of life in society.
- 2.
See, for example, the Community Indicator Consortium (CIC), in the USA.
- 3.
‘Regions’, ‘departments’, communities or ‘municipalities’.
- 4.
See the widespread fame of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)’s index of human development (IDH), despite its relative lack of sophistication.
- 5.
Méda (1999).
- 6.
See also Nordhaus and Tobin (1971).
- 7.
Agenda 21 denotes a strategy for sustainable development first put forward at the 1992 Rio Summit.
- 8.
We are not concerned here with factor analyses. Although we believe that these geometrical analyses can be valuable in certain cases, the aim of our project is not to ‘make the data speak’ but rather to combine this composite indicator with an assumed vision of society (see Sect. 2.1).
- 9.
The associations were involved in projects related to poverty (“Restau du Coeur”, “Secours Populaire”), to housing inequalities (“Droit au Logement”),to gender inequalities (“CORIF”), etc.
- 10.
Therefore, the main reason for the coexistence of these dimensions is the genesis of the indicator and has not been thought as being to be justified by a factor analysis. See below.
- 11.
More than 50 local actors took part in one or other of the debates.
- 12.
September 2007–June 2008.
- 13.
In the sense that the quantitative data still embody political visions and may subsequently serve as collective points of reference.
- 14.
In its initial form, the national barometer of inequalities and poverty was difficult to regionalise and required the use of variables that do not all exist at this level of observation. In Nord-Pas de Calais, the coverage rate for social data is about 75 %. Cf. Jany-Catrice et al. 2009.
- 15.
Eg. The level of household over-indebtedness is taken from Bank of France data, the part-time rate is derived from firms’ annual returns of social data, and so on.
- 16.
Oxford scale.
- 17.
Here, a household’s disposable income comprises earnings from employment, retirement pensions and unemployment benefit, income from personal assets, transfers from other households and social security benefits. Four direct taxes are taken into account: income tax, local tax, the so-called ‘general social security contribution’ (a supplementary social security contribution in aid of the underprivileged) and the contribution to the reduction of the social security debt.
- 18.
Number of applications filed per household. Data for 2004.
- 19.
Nord-Pas de Calais (555 cases for 100,000 inhabitants), followed by Upper Normandy and Picardy.
- 20.
This is a progressive tax on the wealth of French households. It is paid by natural persons and couples whose net fortunes, in 2008, exceeded 770,000 Euros.
- 21.
The national poverty threshold, set up at 60 % of the median revenue, was at 950 Euros per month in 2008.
- 22.
This variable had also been chosen for the UNDP’s Index of Human Development.
- 23.
« Droit au logement opposable », ie. enforceable housing rights.
- 24.
“Regardless of which method is used, weights are essentially value judgments”, OECD, p. 33.
- 25.
Its GDI per capital is 19 % greater than that of Rhône-Alpes, the region in second place.
- 26.
R2 = 0.000. The relationship remains non-significant if the Ile de France is removed from the calculation (R2 = 0.054).
- 27.
Which in our construction, it will have been noted, are more objectified in nature.
- 28.
Consideration of the uncertainty inherent in the development of a composite indicator is mentioned in very few studies (OECD 2008, p. 34).
- 29.
We tested, quite openly, the effect of the change in weightings on the indicator of social health for the 22 French regions (ISH 2004). The ISH was calculated on the basis of equal weightings (p = 1) for all 14 dimensions. The ISH indicator has been recalculated on the basis of 106 weightings fixed according to different cases. In the appendix, Fig. 2.3 (see Appendix) shows the variation in value of the ISH depending on the weighting allocated to the variables. The rectangles represent the dispersion around the mean for the various ISH values calculated for a given region. The vertical black lines indicate the minimum and maximum values reached by the ISH for each region.
- 30.
In which all the French regions are involved, in the institutional and public sense.
- 31.
Together with the Ecological Footprint, and the UNDP IHD.
- 32.
The use of a function log means that the same increase of the household gross disposable income of the will weigh all the less on the value of the ISH that it leaves a high level of this variable.
- 33.
Livingston also mentions the ideas of an ‘ethical aspiration’ and of a ‘local ambition’.
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Appendix
Appendix
Variation in value of the ISH depending on the weighting allocated to the variables (Source: Zotti 2010)
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Jany-Catrice, F., Marlier, G. (2013). Regional Indicators of Well-Being: The Case of France. In: Sirgy, M., Phillips, R., Rahtz, D. (eds) Community Quality-of-Life Indicators: Best Cases VI. Community Quality-of-Life Indicators, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6501-6_2
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