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Title: A survey of indicators of economic and social well-being-[World Wide Web]

Notes: The objective of this paper is to provide a survey of the major indicators of economic and social well-being that have been developed at the national and international levels. The paper is divided into three main parts. The first provides a short overview of the social indicators, looking at the history of the social indicators movement, types of social indicators, purposes of social indicators, and noting how the development of summary indexes, the focus of this paper, represents the latest phase in the history of social indicators. The second part summarizes what the author believes are the best known and most important indexes of economic and social well-being that have been developed, including the Measure of Economic Welfare (MEW); the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI); the Index of Economic Well-Being (IEWB); the Human Development Index (HDI); the Index of Social Health (ISH); the Quality of Life Index (QOL); and the Index of Social Progress (ISP). The indexes are divided into three main categories: 1) indexes that provide consistent historical estimates of trends in well-being for Canada; 2) indexes that provide cross-national estimates of the state of well-being for a particular year for many countries; and 3) indexes that provide estimates of trends in well-being for Canadian provinces and communities. In addition to the indexes surveyed, certain sets of on social indicators. This section also discusses the characteristics, variables covered and trends in the indexes for Canada. The third section of the paper discusses a number of issues in the construction of indexes of economic and social well-being, including criteria for index evaluation and application to the indexes developed for Canada; single versus multiple indicator approaches; money versus composite indicators; weighting issues in composite indicators; national versus community indicators; bottom-up versus top-down index design; advocacy versus knowledge-driven indicators; ad hoc versus theoretically consistent indicators; and technical issues in index construction.`

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