OECD Factblog

How is life?

Jerome Cukier — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:08:26 +0000

Today, How is Life?, the Better Life Index companion publication, launches.
To mark this event, the Factblog is presenting selected charts from the book.

data (csv)

Further information:

How is life? oe.cd/howislife
Your Better Life Index oe.cd/bli

Salary costs per student

Jerome Cukier — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:12:48 +0000

One way to measure education performance is to look at the total cost of teachers’ salaries compared with the number of students being taught. According to the OECD’s Education at a Glance, Luxembourg has the highest salary cost in primary and secondary education, reflecting a combination of relatively high teachers’ salaries and smaller class size. In contrast, in Chile class size is far larger, and teachers’ pay is lower, leading to relatively low overall salary costs in education.

In France, salary costs are just over the OECD average, with extensive and costly instruction time being counteracted by relatively low teachers’ wages. In Germany, high wages explain why salary costs are considerably higher than in France.

Our charts help users compare performance by salary, class size, instruction time and teaching time. If a class is big, salary costs are lower, for instance, and lowest in Korea, and highest in Portgual in upper secondary education. Likewise, the longer students stay in school for instruction, the more this drives up salary costs. In effect, the countries with the highest salary costs as a result of this factor are France and Israel, with the lowest being Poland.

Food inflation rises

Jerome Cukier — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 10:48:42 +0000

Food prices have increased over the year to January 2011 in many of the world’s economies. Moreover, those increases, which accelerated from mid-2010, reversed the downward trend in food prices of 2009 and the first half of 2010, OECD-FAO Agriculture Outlook 2011-2020 says. .

Three-quarters of the OECD countries recorded retail food price increases of 5% or less, while price increases exceeded that in half a dozen or so countries. Two OECD countries, Korea and Estonia, experienced increases of over 10%. Brazil, China, Indonesia and Russia all had double-digit rates of food inflation during the year to January 2011, well up on the previous year. In South Africa, food prices increased by a moderate 3.3%, though this represented a doubling from the rate of the previous year. Food price inflation also accelerated in the second half of 2010 in several countries from Africa, Asia and Latin America. In high-income OECD countries the contribution of food price movements to inflation has been positive though small, generally around 0.5 percentage points.
However, food price increases contributed over 1.5 percentage points to inflation in countries such as Estonia, Turkey, Hungary and Korea. This contrasts with the year to January 2010 when food prices decreased, attenuating inflation. The contribution of food price movements to OECD inflation remains small, the report notes, not least because of the small share of food expenditures in the overall consumer basket.

Migration in a crisis

Jerome Cukier — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 10:33:11 +0000

Migration into OECD countries fell by about 7% in 2009 to 4.3 million people, down from just over 4.5 million in 2008. Recent national data suggest migration numbers fell further in 2010, the 2011 International Migration Outlook says.

data (xls)
The decline is particularly marked in Asian OECD countries and in Europe, notably the Czech Republic, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. Movement between EU member states fell by 22% in 2009. But permanent migration to Australia, Canada and the US rose slightly.

The drop in migration coincided with declining job opportunities from the economic crisis. Temporary labour migration declined by 17% in 2009. Young immigrants have been especially hard hit by job losses, as have workers in construction, finance and retail. However, immigrant employment has risen in education, health, long-term care and domestic services. More migrant women have also joined the labour force, compensating for job losses among male migrants, the OECD report says.

Still, given the severity of the crisis, migration fell less than expected, the OECD believes, probably because ageing and falling fertility rates propped up demand for skilled and unskilled workers. The report makes four key recommendations to help governments improve management of migration flows: convince the public about the facts- most migrants are well integrated in OECD societies; broaden co-operation with origin countries and employers; strengthen integration efforts; and guarantee equal rights by encouraging naturalisation.

New features for OECD better life index

Jerome Cukier — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:29:16 +0000

We’ve made improvements to the Better Life Index, notably you can now embed your own index on your web site as I’ve done here. This feature is available via “share this index”.

Other new features include more explicit pop-up information and better internal navigation.

Create your better life index now!

Your Better Life Index: Some initial trends

Jerome Cukier — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:21:00 +0000

With well over a million hits in its first month, the OECD’s Your Better Life Index has proven to be very popular since it was launched at the 50^th anniversary OECD Forum on 24 May.

The interactive index lets users from the general public to weigh up the factors (initially from a list of 11) they feel matter most in assessing their quality of lives. They may assign greater importance to, say, life satisfaction than governance, for instance, and can then see how well or badly each OECD country performs against their preferred ratings.

Users can share their own Better Life Index with friends and colleagues. These shared indices feed into a database at the OECD, allowing to build a picture of users’ preferences. The index is not an opinion poll, and it would be unwise to extend its findings to the general population. Nevertheless, it casts a light on the factors people see as being important for improving their lives and how countries perform in meeting those expectations. Though a month old, a few clear trends are already starting to emerge.

First, “life satisfaction” is currently the most highly rated topic for most people, followed by “education” and “health”. At the other end of the scale, “community” and “income” rank among the least important issues, while by far the lowest-ranked topic is “governance”. The reasons behind these rankings are still being investigated, and it remains to be seen how these preferences will change over time. For example, “jobs” ranks halfway as an important factor at the moment, despite the economic crisis and high unemployment. Could it slip back as the job scene improves? That remains to be seen. But there is every possibility that the likes of life satisfaction and health are timeless human priorities and will not shift much. Arguably a more important question for policymakers is which countries perform best, based on these factors?

Among the four countries which generated the highest number of users – the US, France, Italy and Canada – the weights people gave to the various factors were broadly similar, which some may find surprising, considering the apparent lifestyle and societal differences between, say, France and the US. Other countries showed quite different preferences compared with these countries, however, with Estonians for instance putting “safety” as their top ranked topic (see chart).

Useful links

Your Better Life Index www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/ (or oe.cd/bli)
Your Real-Time Better Life Index blirt.oecdcode.org/ - statistics on the shared indices

Your better life index: now live

Jerome Cukier — Tue, 24 May 2011 14:41:34 +0000

Your better life index, the tool I mentioned in a previous post, is now live at http://oecdbetterlifeindex.org.

We took the opportunity of OECD’s 50th anniversary to unwrap our branded url shortener, so you can reach it at http://oe.cd/bli as well.

OECD Forum 2011 – facts behind the debates

Jerome Cukier — Tue, 24 May 2011 07:49:26 +0000

Here are the images and charts I have used for the brochure Facts behind the debates which was distributed at OECD Forum.

download the data

Your better life index

Jerome Cukier — Mon, 23 May 2011 10:26:31 +0000

On May 24th, 2011, OECD will release the first part of the Better Life Initiative: your better life index.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Your better life index is a data visualization tool that let you compare countries according to criteria that you choose and which are beyond traditional economic indicators.

Following OECD’s work on progress initiated in 2007 in Istanbul, and the works of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress in 2009, OECD collected data on topics such as life satisfaction, sense of security or perceived health. With the tool, a user can assign priorities to some subjects and see which countries come up first.

The application has been designed by Moritz Stefaner and RauReif. It will be available on May 24th 2011 at http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org

Development aid to slow

Jerome Cukier — Thu, 05 May 2011 09:03:07 +0000

Development aid from OECD donor countries totalled $129 billion in 2010, the highest level ever, and an increase of 6.5% over 2009. But despite this record, the 2010 figures confirm that some donors are not meeting internationally agreed commitments.
In terms of the amount of aid, the US, the UK, France, Germany and Japan were the largest donors, while the EU-based members of the OECD donor group, the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), provided a combined total of $70.2 billion, or some 54% of the overall total.data (xls)
However, total bilateral aid from OECD-DAC donors represents about 0.32% of their combined gross national income (GNI). Only Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden exceeded the United Nations recommended development aid target of 0.7% of GNI.
An OECD survey shows that most donors plan to increase aid over the next three years, though at a slower pace than before: 2% per year between now and 2013, compared to the average 8% per year over the past three years. Aid to Africa is likely to rise by just 1% per year in real terms, compared to an average of 13% over the past three years. At this rate, any additional aid to the African countries will be outpaced by population growth, which is not good news for the fight against poverty or reaching the Millennium Development Goals. See www.oecd.org/dac/scalingup