Measuring Well-being and Progress in Countries at Different Stages of Development: Towards a More Universal Conceptual Framework

A wide range of voices around the world have stressed the need to understand development as a multidimensional phenomenon that involves and affects many aspects of people’s lives. Increasingly, it is recognised that current well-being and its long-term sustainability are the ultimate goals of development and that these notions better capture the human experience of development. The objectives of this paper are to explain why well-being matters in countries at different levels of development and to address measurement challenges in the context of developing countries. These objectives are pursued in four main steps. First, the paper offers a conception of well-being and illustrates its relevance in different development contexts. Second, it describes briefly how the measurement of well-being is implemented under the OECD Better Life Initiative for OECD countries. Third, it proposes ways in which the OECD framework can be adapted to specific development contexts and thereby made more universal, by suggesting relevant well-being dimensions and indicators that could be used to measure well-being in developing countries. Finally, it discusses the possible implications of the adapted framework for OECD work in developing countries, in particular its possible use in the Multi-Dimensional Country Reviews conducted by the OECD Development Centre for a range of non OECD countries. Deuxièmement, il passe brièvement en revue la manière dont la mesure du bien-être est effectuée dans le cadre de l’Initiative de l’OCDE pour une vie meilleure au sein des pays de l’OCDE. Troisièmement, il propose des pistes pour adapter le cadre de l’OCDE à des contextes de développement spécifiques, le rendant de fait plus universel, en présentant des dimensions du bien-être et des indicateurs qui pourraient être utilisés pour mesurer le bien-être dans les pays en voie de développement. Finalement, ce document discute les implications possibles du cadre ajusté pour le travail de l’OCDE dans les pays en développement, en particulier son utilisation dans les Revues pays multidimensionnelles réalisées par le Centre de développement de l’OCDE dans les pays non OCDE.