Soc Indic Res (2011) 102:111–116

DOI 10.1007/s11205-010-9738-9

The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi-Report: Old Wine in New

Skins? Views from a Social Indicators Perspective

Heinz-Herbert Noll

Accepted: 30 September 2010 / Published online: 22 October 2010

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract The recently published report by the ‘‘Commission on the Measurement of

Economic Performance and Social Progress’’ is being discussed and commented from the
point of view of social indicators research, which addresses issues of the measurement of
well-being and social progress since the 1960s. Some of the recommendations made by the
Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi—Report thus seem to be well known and all but new and innovative
from a social indicators perspective. It is also argued that the report ignores some of the
available approaches, instruments and ongoing activities to measure and monitor well-
being and the quality of life, which go well beyond GDP, such as e.g. social reports. The
Commission’s report is nevertheless considered a major step forward towards a consid-
erably improved measurement of well-being and social progress.

Keywords Measurement of well-being
Social indicators
Economic and social

progress
Quality of life
Beyond GDP
Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi—report

In September 2009 the ‘‘Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and

Social Progress’’ published their final report (Stiglitz et al. 2009).1 The Commission
headed by the Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen and coordinated by the
prominent French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi had been established by the President of
the French Republic Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 aiming to develop suggestions how to
improve the quality and adequacy of statistical information on the economy and society. In
addition to Stiglitz and Sen the commission included three more Nobel prize winners in
economics (Arrow, Heckman, Kahneman) and a number of other distinguished scientists,
mainly from the US, France and the UK.

1
Meanwhile the report is also available in a book version (Stiglitz et al. 2010).

H.-H. Noll (&)

GESIS—Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Social Indicators Research Centre, Mannheim,
Germany
e-mail: heinz-herbert.noll@gesis.org

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112 H.-H. Noll

More precisely the task of the Commission included the following assignments (p. 7):
– to identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social
progress, including the problems with its measurement;
– to consider what additional information might be required for the production of more
relevant indicators of social progress;
– to assess the feasibility of alternative measurement tools, and
– to discuss how to present the statistical information in an appropriate way.
The voluminous report and the Commission’s various recommendations are meant to
address four target groups primarily: (1) political leaders, (2) policy makers, (3) the aca-
demic community, statisticians and frequent users of statistical information, and (4) civil
society organizations, both as users and producers of statistics. A most central message of
the report is the request to re-adjust the statistical observation of economy and society and
to shift the focus in the production of statistical information from the measurement of
economic production to the measurement of individual and societal well-being.2
The report is structured into three chapters on ‘‘Classical GDP Issues’’, ’’Quality of
Life’’ und ‘‘Sustainable Development’’, each of them corresponding to a working group
within the Commission. The detailed and thorough considerations concerning each of these
themes have been summarized into twelve recommendations on how to improve the
measurement of economic performance and social progress (pp. 12–18):

1 Recommendations Related to GDP-Issues

– When evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than
production.
– Emphasize the household perspective
– Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth
– Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth
– Broaden income measures to non-market activities

2 Recommendations Related to Measurement of Quality of Life

– Quality of life depends on people’s objective conditions and capabilities. Steps should
be taken to improve measures of people’s health, education, personal activities and
environmental conditions.
– Quality of life indicators in all dimensions covered should assess inequalities in a
comprehensive way.
– Surveys should be designed to assess the links between various Quality of life domains
for each person, and this information should be used when designing policies in various
fields.
– Statistical offices should provide the information needed to aggregate across Quality of
life dimensions, allowing the construction of different indexes.

2
It seems to be noteworthy here, that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2001) had already radically
reorganized its social statistics 10 years ago by focusing its activities at the measurement of well-being.

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The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi-Report: Old Wine in New Skins? 113

– Measures of both objective and subjective well-being provide key information about
people’s quality of life. Statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture
people’s life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities in their own survey.

3 Recommendations Related to Sustainable Development and Environment

– Sustainability assessment requires a well-identified dashboard of indicators. The dis-

tinctive feature of the components of this dashboard should be that they are inter-
pretable as variations of some underlying ’’stocks’’.
– The environmental aspects of sustainability deserve a separate follow-up based on a
well-chosen set of physical indicators. In particular there is a need for a clear indicator
of our proximity to dangerous levels of environmental damage.
All these recommendations seem to address important weaknesses in current economic and
social statistical systems in many countries and the implementation of the recommended
measures would without doubt enhance the measurement of well-being and progress and
improve the knowledge base for policy makers. Many recommendations, which may look
new and innovative—or even revolutionary—from the point of view of economics and
official statistics, as for example the suggestion to eventually utilize indicators of sub-
jective well-being for the monitoring of well-being and progress,3 are well-known and all
but new from a social indicators point of view. Indicators of subjective well-being for
example have been used extensively to measure, monitor and study the quality of life in
numerous countries as early as in the 1970s. Well-known quality of life surveys, like the
‘Quality of American Life’—Survey in the United States (Campbell et al. 1976), the
‘Scandinavian Welfare Survey’ (Allardt 1972) and the series of ‘Welfare Surveys’ carried
out in Germany (Glatzer and Zapf 1984) between 1978 and 19984 are prominent examples
of the early collection and usage of this sort of information on well-being and progress as
part of social indicators research.
The field of social indicators research emerged in the 1960s not least in reaction to an
even by then widespread discussion of the inadequateness and deficiencies of the GDP as
an indicator of well-being and progress and a critical review of the shortcomings of official
statistics with its strong focus at production and inputs rather than well-being outcomes.5
As early as during the 1970s and 1980s various desiderata of how to measure well-being
and progress more adequately have been proposed. Among them for example the following
(see e.g. Noll and Zapf 1994: 3):

3
Easterlin (2010: 120) reminds us in his notes on this report ‘‘that a group of distinguished economists…
would assert that in measuring social progress serious attention should be given to self-reports of subjective
feelings comes close to economic heresy’’.
4
Results from the Welfare Surveys 1978,1980 and 1984 have been published in English as a ‘‘German
Social Report’’ in Social Indicators Research, 19 (1987) 5–171.
5
See e.g. Biderman (1966) as well as Bertram M. Gross, who—in his preface to the first book on ‘‘Social
Indicators’’ (Bauer 1966)—critizises the ‘‘economic Philistinism’’ and notes: ‘‘If we examine the President’s
major policy documents, particularly the Economic Report and the Budget Message, we find practically no
information whatsoever on ’’social structures‘‘. We find that the major indicators deal not with how good but
how much, not with the quality of our lives but rather with the quantity of goods and dollars’’ (Gross 1966:
xiii). Ironically, he also refers to a ’National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic
Progress’, which in its ‘‘final report points out that our ability to chart social change has lagged seriously
behind our ability to measure economic change’’. (Gross 1966: xiv).

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114 H.-H. Noll

– to focus on individuals and households as the units of measurement and observation;

– to give priority to the outcomes of economic and social processes rather than to the
inputs;
– to consider quality of life as resulting from objective living conditions as well as
subjective well-being, and to use both, objective as well as subjective indicators for its
measurement;
– to pay special attention to measures of economic and social inequalities and to stress
the analysis of distributions;
– to consider cumulative advantages and disadvantages by using survey data and to
identify particularly privileged or deprived groups, social classes etc. within society
(see e.g. Berger 1984).
Thus, many of the measures recommended by the Commission on how to improve the
measurement of well-being and progress seem to be part of the tool-box of social indicators
research for quite some time already or are even the result of previous work in this field of
research or ‘movement’ as it was called initially. Moreover, many of the principles and
approaches of the measurement of well-being suggested by social indicators researchers
have found their way into the statistical information systems at national as well as inter-
national levels. ‘Systems of Social Indicators’6 providing aggregate level information as
well as ‘Quality of Life Surveys’ carried out outside official statistics are for example well
established instruments to measure and monitor well-being and social progress, which have
been implemented at national and international levels.
Comprehensive as well as specialized Social Reports, providing data and analyses on
the social situation and well-being within and across societies, are perhaps the most suc-
cessful application of social indicators research overall (Noll 2004: 163 ff). Since the
publication of ‘‘Towards a Social Report’’—a prototype of a social report developed and
authored by Mancur Olsen on behalf of the US Government Department of Health,
Education and Welfare (1969)—social reports have been regularly published for many
years in numerous countries and by supra-national organizations around the globe.7 Some
of the most well known social reports, e.g. the British Social Trends, the Dutch Social and
Cultural Report, and the French Donne´s Sociales—are now being published continuously
for about 40 years.
Reflecting the notion of well-being as a multi-dimensional concept, which always has
been at the center of social indicators research, social indicators systems as well as social
reports usually have been structured by the application of a life-domain approach. The
eight ‘‘key dimensions’’ of well-being identified by the Commission are thus among the
life domains usually addressed by indicator systems and social reports, although some
domains, considered important by the latter (e.g. working conditions, housing, crime and
public safety, leisure), are missing in the list of dimensions identified by the Commission.
Apart from the field of so-called ‘‘happiness-research’’, which economists have entered
more recently, the report of the Commission thus seems to ignore many of the available
approaches, instruments and ongoing activities to measure and monitor well-being and the
quality of life, notably those developed outside the narrow boundaries of economics and
the national and supranational statistics offices. Even the long and esteemed tradition of

6
See e.g. Henderson et al. 2000; Noll 2002; OECD 2009. The data from the European and German Systems
of Social Indicators are accessible through the online information system ‘‘Social Indicators Monitor—
SIMon’’ at www.gesis.org/SIMon.
7
For information on major European social reports, see the following website: www.gesis.org/social-
reporting-in-europe

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The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi-Report: Old Wine in New Skins? 115

French social reporting—not to speak of the social reporting activities in many other
nations—remains completely disregarded. Neither the report ’’Données sociales : La
société française’’, regularly published since the early 1970s, nor the more recent ‘‘France
Portrait Social’’ have been taken notice of by the Commission, although these reports have
contributed considerably in terms of measuring and monitoring well-being and social
progress within the French society beyond economic accounting and GDP.
Is all this to say that the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report is nothing more than old wine in
new skins? The answer is certainly no, and the report is supposed to be a major step
forward towards a considerably improved measurement of well-being and social progress,
particularly as far as official statistics are concerned. The benefits of the report and the
value added are manifold, but from a social indicators point of view the following seem to
be particularly important:
First of all, the report presents more or less up to date views of the current state of the
measurement of economic performance and social progress in three realms: ’’Classical
GDP Issues’’, ‘‘Quality of Life’’ and ’’Sustainable Development’’. While the chapter on
quality of life does not really present a comprehensive and systematic summary of the
current state of the art in quality of life measurement and research—as the report notices
itself (p. 143)—perhaps due to an economist as well as US American bias in the com-
position of the Commission,8 the two other chapters present rich and excellent state of the
art reports and will certainly have a strong impact on the further development of research
in these fields.
A second merit of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi-Report is its role as a major new stimulus for
the debate on the measurement of well-being in academic research, but even more so in the
field of official statistics as well as among policy makers and the general public. Partic-
ularly for official statistics, which continues to be a major player concerning the supply of
quantitative information on the economy and society, but which—apart from the excep-
tions mentioned above—did not yet really embark on the issue of measuring well-being
and social progress, the report has opened a new debate of how to go ‘‘beyond GDP’’. For
national and supranational statistical institutes the Commission’s report and its recom-
mendations will make it much easier to strike a new path and to go beyond traditional
limitations, e.g. by collecting information on subjective perceptions and assessments.
And last but not least, the report obviously has had already a considerable impact on
policy making at the national and supranational level, e.g. the European Union. The
Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi-Report has for example prompted the French and German govern-
ments to put the issue at the ‘‘French-German-Agenda 2020’’ and to request the French
‘‘conseil d’analyse économique’’ and the German ‘‘Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung
der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Lage’’ to draft a common report and to organize a bilateral
conference to be attended by President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel until the end of
2010.9 The bilateral agreement also includes a common request addressed to the European
Union to develop suggestions for the measurement of growth and social progress at the
European level based on the recommendations of the Commission’s report.

8
See the following observations on the composition of the Commission by Easterlin (2010: 119): ‘‘The 25-
member group includes 22 scholars with advanced degrees in economics. Of the other three, two are leading
contributors to behavioral economics, the third a pioneer in the study of social capital. Eight members were
born in the United States, six in France, and three in Britain; four of the remainder are from developing
countries: Only two members are female.’’
9
See the following website of the German Federal Government (visited September 10, 2010): http://www.
bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Artikel/2010/02/2010-02-04-deutsch-franzoesische-agenda-2020.html.

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116 H.-H. Noll

Altogether, the extraordinary relevance and impact of the report, which attracted
worldwide attention, is presumably not primarily due to the innovative nature of its rec-
ommendations and contributions to the current state of measurement of well-being and
progress. More important in my view is the achievement to have successfully attracted the
attention of policy makers, scientists and the public to these issues as well as to add a
degree of authority to the debate, which may eventually facilitate a future implementation
of some of the measures suggested. From this account one might welcome the Commis-
sion’s view, considering the role of the report primarily in its function to open a new debate
on the measurement of well-being and progress, rather than in presenting final answers to
the questions raised. Such a debate will definitely constitute a major challenge particularly
for scholars in the field of social indicators and quality of life in months and years to come!

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