6 May 2016
Susana Franco, researcher at Orkestra, participated on May 6 in the conference “Leaders in GDP and lagging behind in social development: the European Regional Social Development Index under debate” organised by the Catalonia Europe Foundation to discuss the potential of the European Regional Social Progress Index (SPI) as a complement of GDP. The debate arose as a consequence of the following statistic: Catalonia is in 52nd position in the list of European regions according to GDP per capita but, when the parameters of the social development index are applied, it drops to 162nd position (of the 272 European regions for which the index has been calculated), far below other Spanish and European regions with an inferior GDP per capita.
In order to respond to this anomaly, experts in the field met to analyse how the SPI might complement more traditional indicators such as GDP. The SPI, unlike GDP, is the first index which does not include economic indicators but does include social and environmental indicators. This index, which is calculated for countries by the Social Progress Imperative, an international non-profit organisation, has been calculated for European regions as the result of a joint project between this institution, the European Commission Directorate General on Regional and Urban Policy, and Orkestra.
The index is divided into three groups of indicators: basic human needs (for example, access to housing and food), fundamentals of welfare (such as reduced rates of early school leaving) and opportunities for people (for instance, life-long training or inclusion of different social groups). The fact that economic data are not included permits comparisons with GDP, revealing that for low levels of GDP, increase in the latter is associated with a significant rise in the SPI, but that this relation is less clear for countries and regions with higher levels of GDP. In fact, there is a relation between the increase in GDP and the element of the SPI linked to basic human needs and the foundations of welfare, but there is not however a good correlation with the indicators of environmental sustainability and those of health, such as for example obesity or with the indicators of opportunity.
Orkestra became involved in this project because the institute understands competitiveness in a broad sense which seeks to improve citizens’ quality of life. Susana Franco, who participated in the meeting because she had been a member of the team that created the European index, observes that such a complete index also involves challenges and there are some methodological considerations to be taken into account when interpreting the data. Thus, for example, it has been necessary to combine “official sources like the Eurostat standard of living survey” with “other unofficial sources, like the Gallup survey” in order to measure some suspects which, otherwise, would have been excluded from the index. The full presentation can be accessed here.
Moreover, there are important elements such as the quality of life of senior citizens or access to culture, for which there exist no data at a regional level which can be incorporated into the index. In spite of these challenges, the data available indicates that the situation of social progress in Catalonia (also in the Basque Country) is not comparable with that of economic progress (measured via GDP per capita). We now have to ascertain the reason for these differences and what we can do in order also to progress in competitiveness understood in this broader sense.
