President on measuring social progress and welfare

Brdo pri Kranju, 29.11.2010  |  press release

President Dr Danilo Türk attended a round table on the measurement and application of data on social progress and welfare, organised today by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia under the auspices of the Slovenian President and Angelo Gurría, Secretary General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The President of the Republic stressed in his speech at the introductory section of the round table that people always measure what they consider important. He emphasised that the link between measurement and decision-making has always been close, and that measurement has become both a tool and weapon of politics.

The President addressed criticisms of gross national product as the basic indicator of social development, which drew attention that growth did not automatically lead to social development or that gross national product was not sufficiently accurate as an index, which had brought about attempts to create composite indices.

In more recent times, when some of the most developed economies can no longer expect high growth rates, more and more attention, according to the President, is being devoted to qualitative factors such as the quality of education, health care or social services. This has led to a growing awareness that natural resources are finite and that growth of gross national product related to their use is problematic.

President Dr Danilo Türk stressed that growth of the gross national product remains, despite criticism, important as an indicator of trends of available wealth and as an important part of the picture of overall social development and the importance of this growth has increased during the global recession.

The President continued by addressing the human development index established 20 years ago by the United Nations Development Programme, according to which Slovenia ranked 29th both last year and this year. This index, too, was criticised in the past, with the main line of criticism being that it was value-influenced and political. The index, namely, included categories such as the exercise of human rights; criticism in individual countries was caused by rankings not meeting their expectations.

According to President Türk, comparability and the ranking of countries has caused broader public interest in this index. The contents of methods contributing to ranking and results have been positively evaluated by numerous prominent economists and technical experts, which shows that progress had been made in this field.

In the spirit of this progress, the President touched on the measurement of social development in Slovenia, in which he commended the work to date of the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia.

He proposed that Slovenia should devote more attention in particular to measuring property and poverty, the evaluation of work and income not expressed in market categories and statistical evaluation of the voluntary sector and social entrepreneurship.