Angus Deaton, Princeton University

Successes

Here in the World Bank, I should say something about the 2005 round of the ICP One great success

Extensions of content Implementing a broad welfare agenda Health as well as wealth Well-being seen more broadly

Talk about achievements in comparability Extensions in availability

Another Bank success

2005 Round of the ICP

For academics, internationally comparable accounts are among the most important of all development data sets World Development Indicators Penn World Table

ICP 2005 huge improvement over ICP 1993 Central control, general management of WB Integrated global system 1993 round had lost credibility: uncoordinated

regions Changed our view of the world

Broadening scope

Development is about broad based improvement Income is important So are other parts of well-being Health, education, life evaluation, emotional

well-being, mental health Major improvements in measurement,

availability, and comparability of such data world wide Empirical implementation of the Sen agenda Deprivation and well-being in broad spaces

Examples

System of Demographic and Health Surveys Recently a major tool for health assessment in

poverty, deprivation, and health Major source for infant and child mortality

In countries without complete vital statistics Most of the poor countries in the world

Also weighs and measures children (and increasingly) adults Documentation of malnourishment around the

world All of this is on a naturally comparable basis One of my favorite examples: height of

women. .

145

150

155

160

165

170

6 7 8 9 10Log of real GDP per head in year of birth

Aver

age

heig

ht

South Asia

Africa

Latin America & Caribbean

Europe

US

China

Central Asia

6

Other important examples

DHS is only one example And researchers have a lot of catching up to do

Many others WHO World Health Surveys UNICEF MICS Surveys These like DHS easily available and

downloadable Many more income and expenditure

household surveys exist and many more available World Bank leadership of International Household

Survey Network Helping to standardize, store, disseminate Technical support for metadata & standardization

Database for development

World Development Indicators, with many millions of subscribers worldwide

Open Data Initiative WDI is new openly available on line Anyone in the world with access to the internet can

instantly access these data Takes us beyond academics (who were OK) to

governments, NGOs, journalists, around the world Includes other Bank data, projects, and data tools

Exactly the sort of global public goods that the World Bank should be providing Likely to greatly expand and improve development

discourse, nationally and internationally

Private sector too

Gallup World Poll aim is to sample all the population of the world

Since 2006, run identical surveys in 155 countries National samples of 1,000 or so in each country Most countries surveyed in most years Many hard to survey countries, e.g. Myanmar, China,

Cuba, 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa Collects detailed data on self-reported well-being

Emotional experience as well as life-evaluation Demographics Income (much better than one might think)

These data fill an important gap in the world But they are proprietary and a Gallup commercial

asset

Outstanding tasks

Mortality data are seriously incomplete Especially in the poorest countries, especially for

adults “imputing” data from best sources is useful, but

not a substitute WHO world mortality database is a great resources

(under-used) but not useful for the countries where it is most needed

Household survey data Used to be the leaders, now lagging Major inconsistencies (e.g. rate of growth) with NAS LSMS project did many important things, but never

could produce internationally comparable surveys (like DHS for example)

The next big priority

More outstanding

National accounts Very weak in many poor countries Very weak in some not-so poor, rapidly growing

countries I have argued that growth transitions put special

strains on old systems, including possible overstatement of GDP growth rates, for example.

SNA may assure comparability, but adherence to SNA is variable from one country to another

Reconciliation with household surveys has to be open to revision of NAS Politically difficult to revise down fast growth rates

Improving national accounts For ICP, technical assistance to improve

national accounts is now seen as central With more regular ICP, large revisions are going

to be harder to defend Sarkozy Commission challenges

To many currently existing treatments in GDP More dialog between economists & NA

statisticians To develop better “green” accounting To develop measures of self-reported well-being

Ready to move from academia to statistical offices

US example: well-being module in ATUS about to be released

Thank you!

Especially for inviting a user to participate in these discussions today