EU’s Joint Research Centre audits SSI
Recently the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, JRC, in Ispra (Italy) audited the structure and methodology of SSI. As soon as the full report has been published it will be posted on this site.
Dr Michaela Saisana, senior researcher of JRC, informed us about the preliminary findings. The main conclusions and recommendations are:
- JRC’s statistical analysis supports the conceptual structure of the SSI-2010.
- The aggregation method can be improved by using a geometric average, rather than the arithmetical average, since the geometric average better accounts for low scores.
- The aggregation should be limited to the level of wellbeing dimensions. Further aggregation into one single score for the overall index will cause serious losses of information, since it enables compensation of one wellbeing dimension by another one.
- In order to determine the ranking of the 151 countries included in the SSI, the Copeland rule can be applied. It doesn’t give a single value for the final score of each country, but just the ranking, i.e. it calculates how many countries score better and worse respectively than each assessed country.
- The calculation methodology of the indicator Organic Farming should be improved.
- Some more comments on various indicators may very well be sufficiently addressed by following JRC’s recommendations for improved aggregation.
We are most thankful to the JRC for this audit, in particular to Dr Michaela Saisana. It greatly stimulates our work and is very helpful for further improvement of the SSI. We will carefully study the conclusions and recommendations of JRC in more detail. Already now we can state that we will follow the recommendations with respect to the aggregation methodology.
Geurt van de Kerk
President Sustainable Society Foundation
