Paris School of Economics - L'Agence Française de Développement

• For understanding the process of development,
it is important not to conflate health
and income (or other components of wellbeing)
because they do not always move
together, often precisely because of the government
policies whose effects we need to
understand.
Self reported well-being
(section 1.1.2.)
• Self-reported well-being (SWB) measures
have recently received a great deal of attention.
While they are often useful, they need to
be treated with skepticism, if only because
adaptation can make them unreliable guides
to objective deprivation.
• Contrary to much of the literature, it is
important to distinguish different measures
of SWB. In particular, life evaluation measures
behave differently than emotional measures.
It is likely that life evaluation is less subject
to adaptation than are measures of emotional
well-being, and thus arguably more suitable as
a measure of development.
• The Easterlin paradox, that economic
growth is not accompanied by improvements
in well-being is still alive, if under increasing
attack. Until it is resolved, it is hard to recommend
SWB measures as a gauge of economic
development.
Political economy of global
measures
• Global measures of development — poverty,
inequality, hunger, or price levels — operate in
an entirely different political environment
than do domestic measures. The latter, for
example domestic consumer price indexes,
feed into domestic policymaking, and are
typically subject to oversight procedures that
constrain both the statisticians who produce
the data and the politicians and policymakers
who use them. The international agencies
who produce global statistics are subject to
no such oversight, and so are not protected
against even ill-founded suspicion that they
manipulate the numbers in their own interests.
The World Bank’s upward revision of
500 million people in poverty is of a magnitude
that is hard to imagine in any important
domestic statistic, and the lack of any major
reaction from the international community
suggests that global measures play little or no
role in international policymaking; if so, their
significance is unclear.
• If the international development community
believes that global measures of development
are important, it should consider better
monitoring and oversight of the production
of the most important measures.
December 2011 / Measure for Measure / How Well Do We Measure Development? / © AFD [ 17
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