Page 306 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS246 Oscar Gasca Brito
4. Discussion and conclusions
Well-being must be measured where it matters. The characteristics of a
region or city can strongly affect the well-being of the people who live there.
Improving people's lives requires that their region be a better place and the
availability of solid welfare measures is crucial for such improvement. In this
sense, indicators at the national level on material conditions and quality of life
can be misleading and hide important disparities between regions and cities
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within the same country . In addition, many of the policies that most directly
affect people's lives are local or regional and, therefore, require indicators at
this scale.
However, we still have a way to go and in an international context where
we can access more and more information more quickly, we have several
challenges such as statistical institutes that resolve:
· On the one hand, how to make the SDGs, OECD indicators and national
initiatives compatible? Users can be saturated with indicators and information
as well as the level of disaggregation of each one. Among all the initiatives,
there may be more than 80 indicators without counting territorial
disaggregation, by sex, by age, etc. It is imperative for international as well as
national organizations to design a simple and user-friendly indicator system
for the population as a whole, regardless of the level of disaggregation
required.
· On the other hand, we have to keep focus on users, this factor is very
important to better understand their information needs or if additional
indicators are required. The timely updating of indicators, since the
timed release of the data is the success factor of the information
generated. Having internationally comparable indicators, in order to
compare the different public policies among OECD countries and their
regions in terms of Well-being.
· Finally, to have more information at urban and rural level, given the
importance of having the decision-making increasingly accurate and
closer to the people. Think globally; act locally, but for this you need to
have that information. For this, it is necessary to exploit other sources of
information such as administrative records, big data, etc. to be able to
measure well-being on a smaller scale in order to help local government
with their policies.

OECD (2014) Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being http://www.oecd-
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ilibrary.org/economics/oecd-guidelines-on-measuring-subjective-well-being 9789264191655-en
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