There are five main concepts used to measure how countries and the people within them are doing:
- standard of living is largely economic and reflects what we can mostly capture and count relatively simply via surveys and statistics like income, assets, consumption, employment etc;
- quality of life builds on the hard economic numbers with more of a focus on subjective perception of and satisfaction with the reality of life; and
- well-being tries to bring together the soft and the hard numbers together, as well as broader considerations about target groups within a society. The end result is a number of indicators of this reality (economic, social, physical,emotional and spiritual)
- development is Amartya Sen's contribution to the measurement of wellbeing within third world or developing countries. It pays attention to the reality that many in the third world are not able to engage in the benefits of free society because they are simply not free. They are not able to engage because their are societal governmental and even market constraints upon them.
- sustainability comes from the focus of the environmentalists and it concerns the need to understand the real trade offs that arise as a result of economic growth and development, and the impact on the natural environment. Sustainable development is really a process that sustainability dimension within a progress measurement framework therefore encourages statisticians to consider the negative impacts of economic growth on the environment and make this impact explicit.
Quality is life is "relative" and differs between individuals but it can be perceived as the level of satisfaction or confidence with one's conditions, relationships and surroundings relative to the available alternatives (Goldsmith, 1996; Jacoby & Olson, 1986). Toffler (1970) saw quality of life as something a person can attain by learning to cope with and take control of change and by guiding their own evolution. The concept of quality of life is multifaceted.
Quality of life consists of, among other things: hope for the future, land, adequate food, clothing, shelter, income, employment opportunities, maternal and child health, and family and social welfare (Melson, 1980, p.2). Popcorn (1992) suggested that part of our quality of life is manifested in the physical infrastructures of our society (e.g., clean, neat, maintained and safe sidewalks, roads, streets, neighbourhoods, and parks).
Standard of Living
Standard of living is often equated with quality of life, but it is not the same thing. An individual or family's standard of living is an actual measure of the goods and services affordable by and available to them (Goldsmith, 1996). One's expenditures on these goods and services make up the total amount of money spent to maintain (or try to maintain) a standard of living, which varies from person to person (Freudeman, 1972). Garman (1995) recognized that a great motivator of economic growth (national and personal) is our interest in increasing our standard of living. These expenditures or consumption decisions affect the present and future standard of living of families here in North America (Goldsmith) and in other countries (Lusby,1992).
Well-Being
While the level and change in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita have long been used as the main yardstick for measuring and comparing living standards across countries, policy makers and citizens are concerned with much more than just GDP per capita. In particular, they seek to ensure the overall wellbeing of society, both today and in the future. Social indicators aim to provide information on well-being beyond that conveyed by conventional economic measures.
Social indicators provide a complementary approach to GDP-derived proxies for well-being.
Development
Over the centuries, there have been very many theories of development. According to 1998 Nobel prize winner, Amartya Sen, freedom is both the primary objective of development, and the principal means of development. The human being is an engine of change.
Development, for Sen, is the process of expanding human freedom -- hence his famous book's title 'Development is Freedom'. Raising peoples' incomes is important, he says, but so is giving them political rights like the ability to choose their governments and express themselves without fear.
Freedom for Sen goes well beyond providing people with basic political and civil rights. substantive freedom'' requires ''economic facilities,'' ''social opportunities'' and ''protective security''. It clearly includes proactive state-intervention, services and income subsidies for the less successful in society.
According to Sen, development is enhanced by democracy and the protection of human rights. Such rights, especially freedom of the press, speech, assembly, and so forth increase the likelihood of honest, clean, good government.
He claims that “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy”. This is because democratic governments “have to win elections and face public criticism, and have strong incentive to undertake measures to avert famines and other catastrophes”.
Development is the process of expanding human freedom. It is “the enhancement of freedoms that allow people to lead lives that they have reason to live”. Hence “development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systemic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states”.
Sen argues that there are five types of interrelated freedoms, namely, political freedom, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency and security. The state has a role in supporting freedoms by providing public education, health care, social safety nets, good macroeconomic policies, productivity and protecting the environment.
Freedom implies not just to do something, but the capabilities to make it happen. What people can achieve (their capabilities) is influenced by “economic opportunities, political liberties, social powers, and the enabling condition of good health, basic education, and the encouragement and cultivation of initiatives”. Sen calculates that if women in Asia and North Africa were given the same health care and attention, the world would have 100 million more women.
For Sen, “capability deprivation” is a better measure of poverty than low income. While higher GDP does produce improvements in most measures of the quality of life, but there are exceptions. Some places with low GDP/capita like Sri Lanka, China and the India state of Kerala have higher life expectancies and literacy rates than richer countries like Brazil, South Africa and Namibia. And Afro-Americans have a lower life expectancy than males in China and parts of India, although their average real income is far higher.
Some see freedom as a potential disturbance to political stability and development. They recommend repressive interventions of the state in stifling liberty, initiative and enterprise, and in crippling the working of the individual agency and cooperative action. Sen attacks Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and his theories of Asian values which are used to justify political repression. For Sen there is no such thing as Asian values in a continent with vastly disparate populations and traditions, and containing 60 per cent of the world’s population. And as Dani Rodrik said, the economic performance of authoritarian regimes is either very good or very bad – and usually very bad. Most democracies occupy the middle ground.
Sustainable development refers to a mode of human development in which resource use aims to meet human needs while ensuring the sustainability of natural systems and the environment, so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come. The term 'sustainable development' was used by the Brundtland Commission, which coined what has become the most often-quoted definition of sustainable development: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."[1][2]
Sustainable development ties together concern for thecarrying capacity of natural systems with the social challenges faced by humanity. As early as the 1970s, "sustainability" was employed to describe aneconomy "in equilibrium with basic ecological support systems."[3] Ecologists have pointed to The Limits to Growth,[4] and presented the alternative of a "steady state economy"[5] in order to address environmental concerns.
The concept of sustainable development has in the past most often been broken out into three constituent parts: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and sociopolitical sustainability. More recently, it has been suggested that a more consistent analytical breakdown is to distinguish four domains of economic, ecological, political and cultural sustainability. This is consistent with the UCLG move to make 'culture' the fourth domain of sustainability.[6]
References:
McGregor, S. L. T., & Goldsmith, E. B. (1998). Expanding our understanding of quality of life, standard of living, and well-being. Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences, 90 (2), 2-6, 22.
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