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IPS102 Peter V. et al.
1. Introduction
1. Growth of GDP is often considered as the primary policy target.
However, such a focus on a single indicator ignores recent trends in
declining shares of compensation of employees, increasing inequalities in
income and wealth, and hardly improving median incomes. If anything, it
has become clear that the assumption of “trickle down” is flawed. The
resulting political tensions have led to a growing policy attention for
arriving at inclusive growth, i.e. economic growth that benefits the whole
population and not only a happy few. One of the most influential initiatives
in this respect is the 2009 Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report on the Measurement
of Economic Performance and Social Progress.
2. In response to this report, and also motivated by the OECD Inclusive
Growth Agenda (among which the work on broader measures of well-
being; see e.g. the OECD Better Life Index), several initiatives have also
been taken in the area of national accounts, with the objective to put more
focus on (the distribution of) household disposable income, instead of
GDP:
• The dissemination of a dashboard on households’ economic well-
being; see http://www.oecd.org/sdd/na/household-dashboard.htm.
• The dissemination of a quarterly news release on “growth and
economic well-being”; see e.g. http://www.oecd.org/sdd/na/Growth-
and-economic-well-being-oecd-02-2019.pdf.
• A working paper on the decomposition of differences between GDP
growth and growth in real household disposable income.
• A working paper on the impact of valuing unpaid household activities.
• Aligning micro data on the distribution of income and consumption to
national accounts, to arrive at distributional information that is
consistent with macro-economic indicators.
3. In respect of the last goal mentioned in the above, an Expert Group on
Disparities in a National Accounts Framework (EG DNA) was launched in
2011, with the participation of a large number of countries and
international organisations. The objective of this group was to carry out a
feasibility study on the compilation of distributional measures of income,
consumption and wealth across household groups consistent with national
accounts data. The group developed a methodology on the basis of which
first experimental results on income, consumption and saving for five
income quintiles, four household groups based on main source of income,
and eight groups based on the composition of the household were
compiled and published in 2013. In 2015, the expert group engaged in a
second exercise focusing on a more recent year and taking into account a
number of adjustments to the methodology used in the previous exercise.

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