To help overcome inequality, the latest global gathering of economic statisticians agrees, we need to do much more than total up an economy’s goods and services.
Organizers of last week’s fifth OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy could barely contain their sense of satisfaction when the three-day event opened in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Why all the good cheer? Officials at the OECD, the official economic research agency of the developed world, feel they haven’t just been organizing gabfests since the first of these triennial forums in 2004. They believe they’ve been helping change how the world — or at least the global public policy community — thinks about inequality.