A System of Social and Demographic Statistics: A Review Note

Author(s): Dudley Seers

Source: The Economic Journal , Sep., 1976, Vol. 86, No. 343 (Sep., 1976), pp. 595-598
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Economic Society

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The Economic Journal, 86 (September 1976), 595-598
Printed in Great Britain

A SYSTEM OF SOCIAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC

STATISTICS:1 A REVIEW NOTE

The creation of a " System of Social and Demographic Statistics" (SSDS for
short) reflects a number of influences. One is the success of the main system
of economic statistics, the "System of National Accounts" (SNA).2 The SNA
is by no means perfect. It does not give sufficient attention to the needs of
"developing " countries.3 But it has undoubtedly made possible a great
increase in both professional and public understanding of economic problems.
It has, in particular, helped those preparing plans for economic growth, by
providing an integrated and additive framework connecting the main economic
aggregates, thus permitting the quantification of global economic policy
choices as well as bringing out the relationships between policies in different
areas.
As it became clear that social problems were persisting even in countries
experiencing rapid economic growth, the attention of the statistical profession
began to shift to "social indicators", and the question naturally arose whether
a system could be produced in the field of social statistics that would match
what the SNA had done for economic statistics.
The SSDS is an attempt to meet that challenge. The report was written
by Richard Stone, and while it takes account of the comments on an earlier
draft by (among others) the UN Statistical Commission, it has not been
formally adopted by the Commission and needs to be read in conjunction
with some of its other documents.4
The attempt is flawed by a tactical mistake - aiming at "a system", an
aim heavily emphasised in the opening pages. This inevitably invites com-
parison with the SNA. (It is true that the report is cautiously entitled " Towards
a system.. . " but the implication is that the social and demographic statistics
covered can, at least eventually, be brought into a single coherent frame-
work.)
The SSDS did indeed start as a system, Richard Stone's original and useful
system of social matrices, in which human stocks and flows were used to
quantify certain "life sequences", e.g. education.5 This certainly does provide
a framework for various statistics on "states" within a sequence (e.g. attending
school) and on the "transition" from one state to another (e.P. leavincr school) -
' Towards a System of Social and Demographic Statistics (Studies in Methods, series F, no. x8, United
Nations, 1975).
2 A System of National Accounts (Studies in Methods, series F, no. 2, United Nations, I968).
3 See "The Political Economy of National Accounting", my contribution to Employment, Incom
Distribution and Development Strategy. Essays in Honour of Hans Singer, ed. Cairncross and Puri (Macm
1976).
4 "SSDS: Potential uses and usefulness" (ST/ESA/STAT.75, UN mimeo, 1975) by Sir Claus
Moser and "SSDS: Draft guidelines on social indicators" (ST/ESA/STA.76, UN mimeo, 1975).
6 An early account of the basic ideas, with an application to the educational sequence, can be
found in Richard and Giovanna Stone and Jane Gunter, "An example of demographic accounting:
the school ages" (Minerva, vol. vi, no. 2, I968).

[ 595 ]

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596 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL [SEPTEMBER

As such statistics are developed, the

of this kind.
"Towards SSDS", however, grafts on
of other social stastistics. Some of t
of the use of time, can be readily ar
a great deal cannot - statistics of infrastructure such as numbers of hospital
beds, for example, or socio-economic data such as the proportion of GNP
spent on particular social services.
There are in fact several systems within SSDS. They are linked by standard-
ised definitions and classifications, and in that very limited sense the whole
does amount to a "system ". But the degree of integration falls far short of
what was achieved with the financial flows and stocks of the SNA.
Suppose we look at this publication as a collection of essays in which
Richard Stone reflects on a number of related issues - on the logic of his socia
matrices and on various social indicators (and thus social problems), with
a concluding section of empirical examples to illustrate uses of social matrices.'
Then it seems both more defensible and more worth studying by colleagues
in the field, who are otherwise likely to be hung up on the question of whether
it is really a new "system". The analytical coverage is impressive, from
demography to PPBS and social cost-benefit analysis, and the book could
be recommended to anyone who wants to be brought up to date on the state
of applied statistics in the social field in the early I970s. Throughout there is
heavy documentation, notably brief summaries of relevant research findings.
In view of Stone's wide reading and immense experience, a great deal is of
interest, and the style is refreshingly unbureaucratic.
But this document is not presented to the public as a personal monograph.
Only in the middle of the preface is there a reference to Richard Stone's
name. It is published in a series of UN "Studies in Methods", and although
we are told that it has not "yet" been adopted as a set of international guide-
lines, national statistical offices throughout the world are invited to try
applying the system in their own countries.
This advice is highly dubious. It repeats a mistake which was made over
the SNA. The United Nations promotion of the SNA through technical
assistance, conferences and publications, stimulated a considerable proliferation
of economic statistics, and encouraged the use of standard definitions. But
it also led national statistical offices to produce many estimates which lacked
a firm data base and also often conceptual clarity as well. These are moreover
usually arranged in tables more appropriate for global demand management
in Western Europe or North America than for planning structural change.
To present the SSDS in this way invites similar criticism. It will inevitably
be treated as a model for universal application. Yet the report is highly
Eurocentric - or rather Anglocentric: nearly all the empirical applications
(oddly for a UN document) use data for England and Wales. Very little
attention is paid to the quality of basic statistics, or the limited possibilities
1 The examples are limited to certain sub-fields. This section could have been used to substantiate
the crucial claim that the SSDS facilitates linking of analyses.

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1976] A SYSTEM OF SOCIAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC STATISTICS 597

in most parts of the world for gathering and processing additional data. It is
assumed (though this is only correct for a minority of countries) that there are
usable statistics of births and deaths, the starting point in the construction
of social matrices. (Indeed, even though British statistical resources are by
international standards luxurious, there have been technical problems in
constructing social matrices for England and Wales.) Longitudinal studies,
which receive much emphasis in this study, are hardly in most countries
feasible as a general statistical device.
No recognition is shown of the differing suitability of concepts in different
social contexts. The ILO definition of unemployment is treated, for example,
as if it were equally applicable in (say) Britain and India.
The report recognises (para. I.31) that social problems are not the same
everywhere, but this is used to justify a rather unselective treatment. An
alternative conclusion could have been that the author had to discuss how
statistical policy could be adapted to countries with different problems - and
also different levels of statistical resources. That is the approach we might
have expected to find in a UN study of statistical methods.
It would require of course a treatment which was less formalistic and made
its social theory much more explicit. The implied political philosophy here is
a somewhat conventional liberalism - concern about the evils of poverty (and
affluence), and a desire to bring them to the attention of the authorities so
that they can be ameliorated. Distributional dimensions are listed as possible
classifications of tables but are not accorded a great deal of importance in
the text, apart from an interesting discussion of the measurement of social
mobility. Socio-geographic tabulations are mentioned but not emphasised,l
and the empirical examples are mostly global: there is not much recognition
of the "spatial" research which has been growing rapidly in recent years.
Even less provision is made for exploring the causes of social inequality.
There is a brief reference to statistics of "net worth", but in all this lengthy
report on social statistics there is no mention of measuring the concentration
of land ownership.
No mention is made either of indicators of the incidence of anomie in a society
- suicide rates, use of soporific and narcotic drugs, psychiatric illness, etc.
Nor are indicators suggested for assessing foreign influences on the social
culture, such as might be devised from statistics on mass communications -
e.g. the prevalence of foreign films and TV programmes, importation of
foreign magazines, etc.
The tacit assumption that governments are benign is crucial. The statistics
proposed are mostly those which would enable the government to see what
is wrong with the population, not the population to see what is wrong with
the government. The world implied here is one surprisingly free from politica
repression. At the very least the text could have recognised, when dealing
with statistics of crime, for example, that in many countries a large fraction

1 For example, the ratio of medical personnel to the population is discussed as an indicator of the
adequacy of health services (para. 19.79). In a country with big urbanlrural contrasts in the distribu-
tion of such personnel, a national average coefficient can be highly misleading.

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598 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL [SEPTEMBER I976]

of "offenders", especially in labour camps, are not there because they have
committed specific crimes, but for "sedition" or "resisting arrest", i.e. because
their liberty would inconvenience those holding political power.
It would in principle be possible to monitor the operations of bureaucrats
in various ways - by constructing series on deportations and refusals of entry
into a country, on the numbers of refugees enjoying diplomatic asylum (an
important phenomenon in Latin America), and on those under house arrest
or in solitary confinement. Other indicators significant for such analysis would
include the fraction of the labour force in public administration, average hours
per week actually worked by bureaucrats, their salary levels as a multiple
of those in other sectors and the numbers of official cars and drivers available
to each thousand senior politicians and officials.
It would be hard to collect data on these matters -still more so on the
incidence of interrogation and torture - but then the report does not concern
itself much with the feasibility of statistics but with what ideally should be
available. It would have been good to see some recognition that the responsi-
bility of the official statistician, especially in the social field, is not limited to
servicing policymakers but also extends to providing material for those carrying
out critical analyses of the structure and functioning of their society. Although
this principle is not easy to put into practice in many countries, or even to
discuss in depth in UN publications, in the I970S it should surely permeate
independent academic work in this area, which is what this really is.
DUDLEY SEERS

Institute of Development Studies

University of Sussex

Date of receipt ojfinal typescript: March 1976

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