The new Scottish Government is being urged to take forward the ground-breaking work it started in 2007 with its National Performance Framework and to measure what matters.

 

A Round Table brought together by the Carnegie UK Trust, today publishes a series of recommendations on taking forward the way the Scottish Government measures progress through its National Performance Framework.  Drawing on international work, the Round Table argues that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – accepted for years as an indicator for evaluating improved prosperity – fails to reflect factors that are just as important as economic output such as life expectancy, wellbeing, levels of inequality, environment damage and loss of natural resources.  The group says that the Government, in its second term, has the opportunity to use the wider array of information gathered in its National Performance Framework to both communicate what matters to the people of Scotland but also to be held to account by the Parliament.

 

Round Table Chair, University of St Andrews Professor Jan Bebbington, says the group’s recommendations will allow Scotland to measure more than GDP:

 

“The short-comings of GDP as a measure have been well recognised by the Scottish Government which has already started the move to more sophisticated approaches to being able to track the broad impact of policies on Scotland’s people and environment.

 

“Our group has developed the ideas put forward in the report of the Stiglitz Commission, set up by France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, and see how they might work in Scotland.  We believe that Scotland now has a real opportunity to develop further its robust mechanisms to measure more of what actually matters to the nation as a whole.”

 

Round Table Vice Chair and Vice Chair of the Carnegie UK Trust, Angus Hogg says it is essential for policymakers to have access to the right types of data if they are to make the right decisions:

 

“Scotland is leading the way on this work and we look forward to other governments being inspired by their approach.  It has long been recognised that what is measured is what gets done.  Nobody is underestimating how challenging this could be when so many governments and commentators have put so much faith in GDP alone for so long.  Our hope is that our recommendations, which recognise that prosperity and wellbeing are as important as economic growth, will help inform policies that help Scotland achieve its ambitions.”

 

For media inquiries, please contact Keith Small on 0131 557 7727

 

The Recommendations in full

Focusing on delivering economic growth as the end rather than the means is inadequate. Our collective purpose should be improving people’s well-being, so the time is right for Scotland to shift its emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.

 

The Scottish Government should continue to measure GDP but measures of national income and consumption need greater prominence and weight if it is to better track economic performance.

 

The Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisers should review its recommendations on measuring the Scottish economy, taking into account our Report and the expertise now available through Professor Stiglitz’s membership.

 

Material well-being needs to be measured at a household level. In any headline indicator sets the Scottish Government should publish measures of household consumption alongside its current measure of household income.

The Scottish Government must supplement measures on income distribution with ones that show distribution of wealth and consumption. The Government also needs to measure inequalities in other dimensions such as health, housing and education which are central to quality of life.

 

The Scottish Government needs to measure the contribution of the household to the Scottish economy. A practical way to begin this would be to produce comprehensive and periodic accounts of household activity that sit as satellite accounts to the core national accounts.

 

The Scottish Government needs to better measure the contribution of the third sector to the Scottish economy. A practical way to begin this would be to produce comprehensive and periodic accounts of the third sector that sit as satellite accounts to the core national accounts.

 

Civil Society organisations should lead a national debate about what really matters for Scotland. This debate should feed into decisions by future Scottish governments on the long-term goal or goals for Scotland and how to measure progress towards the goal(s).

 

In any high level dashboard, the Scottish Government should better report on subjective views about well-being. We recommend including both the measure of the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being and an index of well-being.

 

While reorganisation of a performance framework to aid better communication and understanding across government and wider civil society will be important, Government’s main challenge for the next four years is to look more carefully at delivery across the wider public sector. There needs to be clearer lines of shared responsibility across the public sector, if delivery is to be properly coordinated.

 

The decision, to cease monitoring and reporting against a Scottish sustainable development indicator set, was a step backwards. Use of a sustainable development indicator set as part of any performance framework is needed. Without such a sub-dashboard, Government cannot properly track levels of economic, human and environmental stocks vital for our future well-being.

 

To properly measure the state of the environment, Government needs to use separate indicators on climate change and biodiversity but could also include an aggregate indicator such as ecological or carbon footprint. Given Scotland’s statutory targets on climate change, Government needs to develop a better climate change indicator. The focus of any indicator should be to report on cumulative emissions reduction, not simply on recording percentage reductions towards the 80% target.