EN Official Journal of the European Union CE 78/229

(2004/C 78 E/0232)

WRITTEN QUESTION E-3151/03

by Herman Schmid (GUE/NGL) to the Commission

(23 October 2003)

Subject: The perception of quality of life in the EU

There are many ways of measuring quality of life. The OECD's league table measures the GNP of the private products and services market. By this yardstick Sweden lies in 17th place.

Another measurement method, devised by the US Department of Labour, looks at the development of industrial productivity (International comparisons of manufacturing productivity and unit labour cost trends 2002, Newsletter 9 September 2003 — Bureau of Labour Statistics, Washington DC). Here the figures show that the increase in productivity development in 2002 was higher in Sweden than in any other country. Accordingly Sweden took 1st place in this table.

It is clear that different measurement systems yield different results. Therefore it is interesting to ask the Commission whether it considers that any of these systems can give a reliable, usable and fair picture of the quality of life in a Member State. Do they not in fact present too narrow a view of quality of life in the EU, whose identity claims to be built on the European welfare model, a balance between competition and social responsibility?

There are also other scales which raise their sights above the measurement of mere economic and statistical figures. These arose because the bodies which commissioned them, including the UN, considered that quality of life must include citizens' perception of their situation. Increased standards of living for the few or for the many need not automatically lead to better quality of life. Citizens must first give their assessment of how a better economy has improved their quality of life as a nation or as individuals. And for this, more advanced measuring criteria are needed.

Measurement methods have been developed which include length of life, a good environment and legal certainty. One international index based on 40 quality of life indicators is called WISP, the Weighted Index of Social Progress. This scale includes variables such as education, health, equality, social economy, demography, environment, social chaos (political rights, corruption, victims of war) etc. On this measurement Sweden again comes in first place.

Does the Commission consider that WISP and similar measuring schemes should be used more often in the EU when comparing EU Member States with each other? Might the balance between competition and the social dimension, to which the EU undertook to aspire under the Lisbon strategy, risk being distorted by more competition and less social responsibility, if the only quality of life scale used in the EU is the OECD's? That being so, should WISP (or similar EU quality of life indices) always complement the OECD's quality of life league table (or similar EU indices for measuring productivity) when quality of life is measured in the EU?

Answer given by Mr Solbes Mira on behalf of the Commission

(20 November 2003)

Many separate but related factors contribute to the quality of life, and this makes defining and measuring the ‘quality of life’ a complex and rather subjective matter.

The level of production of goods and services in a country — measured as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — is a measure of material well-being, which would generally be considered as an important component of the overall quality of life. However, quality of life is clearly about more than material well-being, and the Commission has never presented estimates of levels or growth in GDP as being equivalent to a measure of the quality of life.

The question refers specifically to the Weighted Index of Social Progress (WISP). This is one of a number of similar measures that have been developed in recent years to try to capture the broader aspects of quality of life. Examples include the Environmental Sustainability Index and the Human Wellbeing Index. There are two critical stages in the construction of these indices: first, a set of variables must be chosen, and second, these must be aggregated to produce a single number, which is called the index of social progress, or environmental sustainability, or human wellbeing, and so on, depending on the compiler of the index.

Both of these stages — selecting the variables, and deciding how they are to be added together — involve a considerable degree of subjectivity, and this is a major drawback to all such synthetic indices. By changing the set of variables, or the weighting method, different measures and thus different rankings of countries may be calculated, so that it is questionable whether such indices are more robust measures of the quality of life than conventional statistics.

Rather than trying to compress a multi-dimensional subject such as the quality of life into a single number, it may be more appropriate to use a range of measures that reflect this multi-dimensionality and avoid the subjectivity that is an inevitable weakness of index-based approaches. Indeed, this is the approach that international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations have adopted to address issues related to sustainable development, by devising sets of sustainable development indicators. Eurostat has adapted the United Nations set of indicators to Member States — see the publication ‘Measuring progress towards a sustainable Europe’ — and is currently developing a set of indicators that can be used to monitor progress in implementing the Union sustainable development strategy.

This method has also been adopted to monitor the Lisbon strategy, for example, where the Commission and the Council have agreed a set of structural indicators that relate to the various elements of the strategy, and the Commission has developed a database containing additional data relevant to the strategy. In this way, progress towards each of the Lisbon objectives is measured, allowing a balanced picture of overall developments to be formed.