OECD Forum 2013 - Jobs, Equality and Trust

Read the full message from OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría

It’s all about people: Jobs, Equality and Trust

Read the full message from Norwegian Minister of Finance Sigbjørn Johnsen, Chair of the 2013 OECD Ministerial Council Meeting

Promoting inclusive growth

Six years into the greatest economic crisis of our lifetimes, governments need to tackle high debt and deficits while sowing the seeds of sustainable and more inclusive growth. But just how can they pull that off with 200 million people unemployed and young people particularly hard-hit, inequality on the rise and so far fragile signs of a return to economic growth?

The crisis has raised real questions about how we measure the health of our economies and societies. Even before the crisis hit, there were questions about whether GDP alone is enough to tell us what is happening. Inequality widened in most OECD countries during the boom years, something that was not captured immediately, for example.

Read more

Rebuilding trust

Trust makes economic transactions smoother and more efficient and is the basis for social interactions. Yet most people do not trust government or business and many are suspicious of the media. The reasons vary in each case, but today’s attitudes have their origins in the recession.

Corporate greed and bad management are seen as the initial cause of the financial and economic crisis, but governments are blamed too, both for failing to prevent the crisis from happening in the first place, and for appearing to propose only solutions that made life worse for victims such as the unemployed, those on low incomes or users of public services.

Fostering sustainability

Despite crises and recessions, living standards worldwide have been rising on average over the past 50 years or more. The UN’s Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty over 1990-2015 will probably be attained.

Real GDP per capita has doubled or tripled in OECD countries since the Organisation was founded in 1961. We grew used to the notion that the communities we live in will become wealthier, better educated, more enlightened, healthier, and so on. Until recently, just about everybody assumed that children would have a better life than their parents.

Better Life Index

There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics. We all know this is true, but the current economic and financial crisis has re-focussed attention on those other elements. The trick is deciding what actually makes for a better life, and how to measure progress.

After all, economic growth is not an end in itself – the point of growth is to deliver better lives for people across society. It was already becoming clear in the years before the crisis that GDP alone was not cutting the mustard – during the boom years inequality was widening in most OECD countries, and more money was not making people happier. But what else should we be measuring to get the full picture?

Read more