JRC-CRELL/OECD Workshop on Measuring Well-being and Societal Progress

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Aula Pio XI
Largo Agostino Gemelli 1
Milan, 19-21 June 2006

The OECD and the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning (CRELL) at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) recently hosted a workshop on "Measuring Well-Being and Societal Progress," with the objective of producing recommendations for a framework of indicators to guide policy-makers in the pursuit of well-being.

The second and third days of the workshop focused mainly on the challenges involved in constructing comprehensive measures of well-being, and on the specific role of education in this measure. The workshop explored the structure of a framework for well-being and how to identify a set of key indicators for guiding structural policies towards the well-being of nations.

This workshop was also one of several events the OECD is co-ordinating as part of a new OECD World Forum project, entitled "Statistics, Knowledge and Policy." The World Forum conference, held in Palermo in November 2004, which focused on key indicators, was the first event of this kind and another World Forum is scheduled for June 2007. In the meantime, preliminary events will be organised in various parts of the world. These events constitute a co-ordinated worldwide attempt to develop indicator systems on how best to measure the progress of societies and to improve the nexus between statistics and policy-making. You can obtain more information at http://www.oecd.org/oecdworldforum. The workshop is also part of a series of workshops on composite indicators organised jointly by the OECD and the JRC in recent years – see http://farmweb.jrc.cec.eu.int/CI/.

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