More and more statistics are published every year. The flood of information is making it increasingly difficult to form a clear and coherent picture of the development of society. To complicate the situation further, different statistics often give a contradictory picture of this development.
One recent trend aimed at facilitating the use of statistics in decision-making has been to compile different kinds of indicator packages which include the key statistical indicators on a given subject. For example, two major indicator packages have been compiled for purposes of EU decision-making.
The first of these is the Euroindicator package (PEEI) designed to support EMU policy-making. The package is composed of sets of indicators concerning:
Another important indicator package designed to support EU decision-making is the system of EU structural indicators. This provides a useful tool for monitoring long-term development in society from the point of view of its political objectives.
Structural indicators describe five domains:
Each of these domains has its own long-term development objectives and a set of indicators with which the attainment of these objectives is monitored. For example, structural indicators describing innovation and researchare aimed at describing how the EU is advancing towards the information society.
The indicators are as follows:
For the measurement of progress towards the information society it is not enough to look simply at one statistical indicator (e.g. the figure for Internet connections in households).
The United Nations Development Program, for example, has developed indicators from the global perspective. It has built an index for describing human development in countries worldwide.
The Human Development Index (HDI) measures the average achievement in a country in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living. Health is measured with life expectancy at birth. Adult literacy rate and gross enrolment ratio in education at various levels describe knowledge. Gross domestic product per capita is used as a measure of a decent standard of living. The highest measurement in each dimension is denoted with one and the lowest with zero. The scale for life expectancy at birth ranges from 25 to 85 years. If it is 85 in a certain country that country receives the value 1 with this measure. In Finland, life expectancy at birth is 79 years, so Finland gets the value 0.83.
Depending on the result of the actual measurement each country receives a value between one and zero in each dimension. An average is then calculated from the values of the three dimension indices to describe overall human development in the country concerned. In the 2008 comparison Finland received the value 0.954, which was the 12th highest among the compared countries of the world. HDI rankings 2008.
An index with emphasis on gender equality and empowerment has been developed from the Human Development Index. A related index has also been constructed for measuring human poverty.
Further information about these is available on the website of UNDP
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