Society at a Glance

Frequency :
Biennial
ISSN :
1999-1290 (online)
ISSN :
1995-3984 (print)
DOI :
10.1787/19991290
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The OECD biennial report providing internationally comparable data on demography and family characteristics, employment and wealth, mobility and housing, health status, social expenditure, subjective well-being, social cohesion, and other social measures. Included are such interesting variables as suicides, child care costs, prisoners, gender wage gaps and mothers in employment.

Also available in: French, German
 
Society at a Glance 2006

Society at a Glance 2006

OECD Social Indicators You or your institution have access to this content

Authors:
OECD
Publication Date :
22 Feb 2007
Pages :
115
ISBN :
9789264028197 (PDF) ; 9789264028180 (print)
DOI :
10.1787/soc_glance-2006-en

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OECD's biennial stocktaking of social indicators of OECD countries, this unique publication has been revised to be structurally similar to OECD's annual Factbook.  For each of the almost 40 indicators provided, a two-page spread shows on the left side definitions of indicators and commentaries on trends, while the right side shows tables and graphs highlighting key messages found in the data. This edition includes general context indicators such as income per capita, self-sufficiency indicators such as mothers in paid employment; equity indicators such as gender wage gaps; health indicators such as sick-related absences from work; and social cohesion indicators such as trust in political institutions. This edition includes StatLinks, URLs under each table and graph that link to Excel spreadsheets containing the underlying data.
Multilingual Summaries
Also available in: French, German

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  • Foreword
    This is the fourth edition of Society at a Glance, the OECD bi-annual compendium of social indicators. This report attempts to satisfy the growing demand for quantitative evidence on whether our societies are getting more or less equal, healthier, and cohesive. It updates some of the indicators included in the first three editions, and adds new ones including measures of childcare costs, poverty persistence, health inequalities and trust in political institutions. This report also includes two special chapters: i) a "guide" to help readers in understanding the structure of OECD social indicators; and ii) an attempt to take stock of the role of social indicators for the broader agenda of measuring the well-being of OECD citizens and societies. More detailed information on all indicators, including those not in this edition, can be found on the OECD web pages (www.oecd.org/els/social/ indicators/sag).
  • Indicators Framework and Assessment
    The first question requires indicators covering a broad range of social issues. As social development requires health, education, economic resources and a stable basis for social interactions, indicators need to inform on all these dimensions. The second question is more challenging. Societies try to influence social outcomes, usually through government policy, and the question is whether such policies are effective in achieving their aims. Indicators help in making that assessment. A first step is to compare the changes in social outcomes that social policies try to influence with the scale of the resources that are used to that effect. While this comparison does not allow a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of a particular programme, indicators can highlight areas where more analysis is needed.
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  • Expand / Collapse Hide / Show all Abstracts General Context Indicators

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    • National Income per Capita
      Among the different measures available in the System of National Accounts (SNA), net national income (NNI) per capita is the best indicator for comparing economic well-being across countries. NNI is defined as gross domestic product (GDP) plus net receipts of wages, salaries and property income from abroad, minus the depreciation of fixed capital assets (dwellings, buildings, machinery, transport equipment and physical infrastructure) through wear and tear and obsolescence. Estimates of NNI per capita, however, are subject to greater uncertainties than those associated to GDP per capita, the most widely used indicator of national income (and the one included in previous editions of Society at a Glance), because of the practical difficulties in measuring international income flows and capital depreciation. Because of lack of data on capital depreciation, NNI estimates are not available for Hungary and Poland: based on values of their "gross" national income per capita (USD 14 000 and USD 11 000, respectively, in 2003), both countries would however appear to belong to the low half of the income range between USD 10 000 and 20 000 shown in Figure GE1.1.
    • Age-Dependency Ratios
      Age-dependency ratios are a measure of the age structure of the population. They relate the number of individuals that are likely to be "dependent" on the support of others for their daily living – youths and the elderly – to the number of those individuals who are capable of providing such support. The key indicator of agedependency used below relates the number of individuals aged less than 20 and of those aged 65 and over to the population aged 20 to 64. Two other indicators are presented in this section: the youth-dependency ratio (for individuals aged less than 20) and the old-age-dependency ratio (for persons aged 65 and more), both calculated relative to the number of individuals aged 20 to 64. Taken together, these ratios provide information about the demographic shifts that have characterized OECD countries in the past and that are expected in the future.
    • Fertility Rates
      The total fertility rate in a specific year is the number of children that would be born to each woman if she were to live to the end of her childbearing years and if the likelihood of her giving birth to children at each age was the currently prevailing age-specific fertility rates. It is generally computed by summing up the age-specific fertility rates defined over a five-year interval. A total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman ensures broad stability of the population, on the assumptions of no migration flows and unchanged mortality rates.
    • Migration
      Place of birth and nationality are the two criteria most commonly used by OECD countries to define their immigrant population. Based on the first criterion, migrants are persons residing in a country but born in another, i.e. first-generation migrants. According to the second criterion, migrants are residents who have the nationality of their home country, and may include persons born in the host country. Cross-country differences between the size of the foreign-born population and that of the foreign population depend on the rules governing the acquisition of citizenship in each country. In general, estimates of the foreign-born population are substantially higher than those based on nationality. While different national definitions have traditionally limited cross-country comparability of the stock of migrants in different OECD countries, this issue of Society at a Glance presents for the first time comparable data of the foreign-born population derived from population censuses (Dumont and Lemaître, 2005).
    • Marriage and Divorce
      The crude marriage rate expresses the number of marriages formed each year as a ratio to the total population; similarly, the crude divorce rate is the number of these marriages that is dissolved in a given year, also expressed with respect to population size. Both measures disregard families based on informal partnerships and other types of legal unions (as introduced recently in some OECD countries) as well as married but separated spouses. All of these statistics – which are derived from Council of Europe, Eurostat and other national sources – are based on administrative registers.
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    • Employment
      In the definition of the International Labour Organisation, a person is considered as "employed" if he or she works for pay, profit or family gain (in cash or in kind) for at least one hour per week, or is temporarily absent from work because of illness, holidays or industrial disputes. The data from labour force surveys of OECD countries used in this section rely on this definition. The basic indicator for employment used here is the employment-topopulation ratio (also called employment rate), which is measured as the proportion of the population of working age (persons aged between 15 and 64) who are employed, either as a self-employed or as an employee. Employment rates are presented for individuals grouped by age, gender and educational attainment.
    • Unemployment
      The basic indicator of unemployment used here is the unemployment rate – the proportion of people out of work among the active population of working age (15 to 64). The data presented in this section are gathered through labour force surveys of member countries. According to the standardised ILO definition that is used in these surveys, unemployed individuals are those who did not work for at least one hour, either as an employee or self-employed, in the reference week of the survey; that are currently available for work; and that have taken specific steps to seek employment in the four weeks preceding the survey. Thus, for example, people who cannot work because of physical impairment, who are not actively seeking a job because they have little hope to find one, or are in full-time education, are not considered as unemployed. Various breakdowns are presented below: by age (15-24, 25-54 and 55-64), gender and educational attainment of the individual, and by duration of the unemployment spell.
    • Mothers in Paid Employment
      In all OECD countries, mothers confront obstacles when they try to reconcile their family responsibility and a paid job. To illustrate the extent of these obstacles, this section presents measures of the employment rates of mothers according to the number of children that they have (one child and two or more children) and the age of their children (less than 3, from 3 to 6, and 6 to 14) relative to those of childless women. Women employed include those working part-time, and the data are not expressed on a "full-time equivalent" basis.
    • Childcare costs
      This indicator quantifies the out-of-pocket costs to families of purchasing centre-based childcare. These costs take into account a wide range of factors, including fees charged by childcare providers as well as childcarerelated tax concessions and cash benefits available to parents. The cost figures are derived by comparing the disposable income, measured after deducting childcare expenses, of a family who does not purchase formal, centre-based childcare with that of an otherwise similar family who does. Childcare cost estimates are disaggregated to identify the different policy instruments used by government to reduce such costs, and presented for different characteristics of individuals and households, with a focus on those parents whose employment decisions are particularly responsive to financial incentives to work: lone parents and second earners with young children requiring care.
    • Tax Wedge on Labour
      The measure of the tax wedge on labour presented in this section is defined as the difference between the salary costs of a single "average worker" to their employer and the amount of net income ("take-home-pay") that the worker receives. The taxes included are personal income taxes, compulsory social security contributions paid by both employees and employers, as well as payroll taxes for the few countries that have them. The amount of these taxes is expressed as a percentage of the total labour costs for firms, i.e. the sum of gross earnings, employers’ social security contributions and payroll taxes. The "average worker" is taken to represent a full-time worker in industry sectors C-K of the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) of All Economic Activities, Revision 3.
    • Out-of-Work Benefits
      The measure of out-of-work benefits compares the net income of a person when out of work to that when in work. The main indicator shown here is the net replacement rate, defined as ratio of net household income when the household head is out of work to that it previously enjoyed when its head was employed. Marginal effective tax rates present similar information in a different way, by considering the financial consequences of taking up or increasing the amount of paid work (i.e. they measure the percentage of additional earnings that are "taxed away" through a combination of reduced benefits and higher income taxes). The indicator of effective tax rates shown here refers to a person who has been unemployed for less than 60 months as they re-enter employment at different earnings levels.
    • Students' Performance
      Students’ performance can be assessed through results from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the most comprehensive and rigorous international effort to date to measure the knowledge and skills of students who are reaching the end of compulsory education. More than a quarter of a million 15-year-old students in 41 countries took these tests in 2003. Tests are administered under independently supervised conditions in order to assess students’ competencies in different areas and to assure cross-country comparability.
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  • Expand / Collapse Hide / Show all Abstracts Equity Indicators

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    • Material Deprivation
      Measures of material deprivation provide a complementary perspective on poverty to that provided by conventional income measures. Material deprivation refers to the inability for individuals or households to afford those consumption goods and activities that are typical in a society at a given point in time, irrespective of people’s preferences with respect to these items. Indicators of material deprivation are available through household surveys for several OECD countries, though income-based measures of poverty are available for more countries.
    • Earnings Inequality
      Earnings inequality can be assessed using a variety of statistics. The indicator used here is the "decile ratios", which is obtained by comparing earnings in the top and the bottom deciles of the distribution (the 10% of workers with the highest and lowest earnings) to median earnings (the earnings level which divides employees into two groups of equal size). In this section, D9 denotes the upper limit of the 9th decile of the earnings distribution (which is equal to the lower limit of the top decile), D1 is the upper limit of the bottom decile while D5 denotes median earnings.
    • Gender Wage Gaps
      Gender differences in wages provide an indicator of the degree to which men and women do or do not receive equal incomes from paid work. The "gender wage gap" is measured here as the difference between male and female median full-time earnings expressed as a percentage of male median full-time earnings. It is also measured at low and high earnings levels (the 20th percentile and 80th percentile respectively).
    • Intergenerational Mobility
      Intergenerational mobility is defined as the extent to which some key characteristics and outcomes of individuals differ from those of their parents. Different strands of analysis have focused on different types of indicators. The economic literature has mainly focused on movements between income (or earnings) classes or percentiles of the distribution. The sociological literature has mainly focused on movements between occupations ranked according to their prestige or social class.
    • Public Social Spending
      Social support to individuals and households in need is provided by a range of people and institutions (relatives and friends, public and private entities) through a variety of means. In developed market economies, much of this support takes the form of social expenditures, which comprises both financial support (through cash benefits and tax advantages) and "in-kind" provision of goods and services. To be included in social spending, benefits have to address one or more contingencies, such as low income, old age, unemployment and disability. Programmes regulating the provision of social benefits involve either redistribution of resources across households or compulsory participation.
    • Total Social Spending
      A comprehensive account of the total amount of resources that each OECD country devotes to social support has to account for both public and private social expenditures, and the extent to which the tax system alters the effective amount of support provided. To capture the effect of the tax system on "gross" (i.e. before tax) social expenditures, account has to be taken of the government "clawback" on social spending through the direct taxation of benefit income and the indirect taxation of the goods and services consumed by benefit recipients. Moreover, governments can pursue social goals by awarding tax advantages for social purposes (e.g. child tax allowances). From the perspective of society, "net" (i.e. after tax) social expenditure, from both public and private sources, gives a better indication of the resources used to pursue social goals. From the perspective of individuals, "net social expenditure" reflects the proportion of an economy’s production on which benefit recipients lay claim.
    • Poverty Persistence
      Poverty persistence can be measured by looking at those individuals whose income is below a fixed threshold (usually a proportion of median disposable income) over a three-year period. This measure is computed on the basis of special tabulations from surveys that follow individuals over time. A number of different definitions of persistent poverty are possible. One is to measure the share of individuals who are always poor over the three years (i.e "the persistent poor"). Others include how many people are poor in two out of the three years ("recurrent poor") and how many are poor only once over this period ("poor only once"). The income concept used is that of yearly disposable income (i.e. after transfers and payments of income taxes and social security contributions) of households, where each person is attributed the "equivalised" income of the household where he or she lives, based on a commonly used factor to adjust for differences in household size (the squared root elasticity).
    • Housing Costs
      Housing costs are critical determinants of the living conditions of individuals and households. The main indicator of housing costs used below is the share of household income that is devoted to housing, based on data from the annual national accounts of OECD countries. Housing expenditures of households, as defined in national accounts, include actual and imputed rents (the rent-equivalent that home owners would pay for a house with similar characteristics to the one the own), spending on housing maintenance and repairs, as well as the costs for water, electricity, gas and other fuels. They exclude the interest and repayments on loans for home purchases as inclusion of these alongside imputed rents would amount to double counting. Imputed rents are a better measure of "true" housing costs, as some part of mortgage repayments should really be seen as household savings. Because of the long delays in data collection and dissemination, national account data on housing costs presented here only extend to 2003 for most countries.
    • Old-Age Pension Replacement Rates
      The old-age pension replacement rate is a measure of how effectively a pension system provides income during retirement to replace earnings which were the main source of income prior to retirement. The indicator shown here is the expected pension benefit for a full-career, single worker in the private sector entering the labour market at age 20. It includes all mandatory parts of the pension system, both public and private, while excluding voluntary pensions, which are important in some countries. This indicator aims to show the long-term stance of the pension system and takes account of all changes in rules and parameters that have been legislated; phased-in legislated changes will thus be fully in place by the time of retirement. Parameters are those for a person entering the labour market in 2004. A standard set of economic assumptions is used for each country.
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  • Expand / Collapse Hide / Show all Abstracts Health Indicators

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    • Life Expectancy
      Life expectancy is the most general and best known measure of the health status of the population. Changes in life expectancy are related to a range of interdependent variables such as living standards, lifestyles, and access to quality health services. As underlying socio-economic factors do not change overnight, changes in life expectancy are best assessed over long periods of time.
    • Health Care Expenditure
      Total expenditure on health measures the final consumption of health care goods and services (i.e. current health expenditure) plus capital investment in health care infrastructure. It includes spending by both public and private sources (including households) on medical goods and services, as well as expenditures of public health and prevention programmes and administration. Excluded are a number of health-related expenditure such as training, research and environmental health. The two major components of total current health expenditure are: expenditure on personal health care and expenditure on collective services.
    • Low Birth Weight
      Low birth weight is defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the weight of an infant at birth of less than 2 500 grams (5.5 pounds) irrespective of the gestational age of the infant. This cut-off figure is based on epidemiological observations regarding the increased risk of death to the infant and serves for international comparative health statistics. The number of low birth weight births is then expressed as a percentage of total live births. The majority of the data comes from birth registers; however, in the case of the Netherlands the source is a national health interview survey.
    • Sick-Related Absences from Work
      Measures of sick-related absences from work are important in several respects. They inform about the labour-supply loss (i.e. forgone output) and the expenditure pressures arising from sickness absences from work; and they provide evidence about workers’ health, the extent of their job satisfaction and integration into the workplace. There is no internationally agreed definition of sickness absences nor a unique data source to be used for international comparisons. Those based on records from health insurance or company registers, while providing the main source of information for each country, are affected by different national practices in the recording of such absences. A better alternative is represented by self-reported sick absences measured through household surveys, although these may be affected by small sample sizes, differences in the frequency of surveys and in the wording of questions.
    • Long-Term Care Recipients
      Long-term care refers to the range of services required by persons suffering from a reduced degree of functional capacity, physical or cognitive, and who are dependent on help with basic activities of daily living, such as bathing, dressing, eating, getting in and out of bed or chair, moving around and using the bathroom. This personal care is frequently provided in combination with help with basic medical services such as help with wound dressing, pain management, medication, health monitoring, prevention, rehabilitation or services of palliative care.
    • Health Inequalities
      Health inequalities can be described in different ways. Two indicators are presented in this section, and they both relate to mortality (rather than morbidity). The first is a measure of the dispersion in the ages of death – or, alternatively, in the length of life – among individuals in different OECD country, as defined by Edwards and Tuljapurkar (2005). The specific measure of dispersion in the age of death used is the standard deviation of all deaths above the age of 10. The main advantages of this indicator are its simplicity and the fact that it provides a direct measure of health inequality between individuals. This indicator is based on data from the Human Mortality Database, and is available as a time series for most OECD and non-OECD countries, for both the total population and by gender.
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  • Expand / Collapse Hide / Show all Abstracts Social Cohesion Indicators

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    • Voting
      Voting is one dimension indicators of people’s participation in the life of their community. The indicator used here to measure the participation of individuals to the electoral process is the "voter turnout", i.e. the number of individuals that cast a ballot during an election as a share of the voting-age population – generally the population aged 18 or more – as available from administrative records of member countries. Different types of elections occur in different countries according to their institutional structure and for different geographical jurisdictions. The elections considered here are those that attract the largest number of voters in each country: presidential elections for Finland, France, Korea, Mexico, Poland and the United States, and parliamentary and legislative elections for other OECD countries. Data about voter turnout are extracted from the international database organised by the Institute for Democratic and Electoral Assistance (IDEA).
    • Prisoners
      Crime is not only a cause of suffering to victims and their families but also a manifestation of the extreme marginalisation from mainstream society that affects some individuals. Crime also generates high costs to society in the form of imprisonment, where these costs are normally justified by reference to a combination of three societal "needs": to inflict retribution, to deter others from behaving in a similar way, and to prevent re-offending.
    • Suicides
      The data on suicides presented in this section are based on official registers providing information on "causes of death" of each person in each year, as presented in OECD (2006). These suicide rates are standardised to remove the effect of differences in age structures across countries and over time by using the OECD population structure in 1980, and are expressed per 100 000 individuals. The World Health Organisation defines "suicide" as an act deliberately initiated and performed by a person in the full knowledge or expectation of its fatal outcome. Crosscountry comparability of suicide data is affected by the criteria retained by certifying officers to establish the person’s "intention" of killing themselves, by who is responsible for filling the death certificate, the frequency of forensic investigations, confidentiality rules on the causes of death of each person. All of these factors are affected by the cultural and religious context of each country
    • Work Accidents
      Work accidents are sudden and sometimes violent events occurring during the execution of work leading to health damage or loss of life of the worker. International comparisons of work accidents are difficult, because of differences in record-keeping – e.g. statistics sometimes only record "compensated" accidents in workplaces of a sufficient size and exclude minor injuries – and in data-sources – insurance companies, social security registers, labour inspectorates, establishment censuses and special surveys. Comparability has however improved since the adoption of an ILO Resolution on "Statistics on occupational injuries resulting from accidents at work" in 1998, which sets out standards for data collection and presentation. The Resolution recommends capturing data on all work-related accidents causing an absence from work of at least one day (excluding the day of the event) during a given reference period (usually one year).
    • Strikes
      Strikes are one manifestation of industrial conflict. The ILO’s International Conference of Labour Statisticians defines strikes as a temporary work stoppage or closure of a workplace resulting from the initiative of one or more groups of workers or employers to enforce or resist demands and express grievances, or to support other workers or employers in their demands or grievances. The most comprehensive indicator of industrial conflicts is the proportion of the hours of work that is lost because of strikes, but this is available only in a few countries. Therefore, the main indicator used here is the ratio between the number of working days lost because of strikes and that of all employees.
    • Trust in Political Institutions
      Trust in political institutions refers to the extent to which individuals have a high degree of confidence in the institutions (government and parliament) and public administration of the country where they live. Data on these variables are derived from the 1999-2004 wave of the World Values Survey, which ask individuals to rate their confidence in a number of organisations, with responses grouped in four categories (a great deal of confidence, quite a lot, not very much and no confidence at all). The indicators presented below refer to respondents that indicate either "a great deal" or "quite a lot of confidence" in government, parliament and civil service, as a percentage of all respondents. Data comparability across countries may be affected by the small sample size and other survey features.
    • Life Satisfaction
      Subjective measures of life satisfaction assess the extent to which individuals evaluate favourably the overall quality of their life. Data are gathered through surveys that ask respondents "how satisfied" they are with their lives in general (and in specific domains), with respondent rating satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10 (from lowest to highest levels of satisfaction). The indicator used in this section is the share of respondents that report a lifesatisfaction score equal or higher than seven. The focus is on how life-satisfaction scores differ across groups of individuals (by gender, age, education, employment status, marital status and income) as well as on how the average score for each country correlates to a range of other social and economic outcomes.
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