WHY MEASURING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT MATTERS
Dr Kevin Johnson
I am leading a technical team designing a tool to measure the quality of life in any city worldwide . This is the latest in a series of projects I have been working on with UN-Habitat . In one way or another , they all focus on helping local governments achieve the United Nations ’ sustainable development goals . They do this by providing digital tools for monitoring important changes .
We are designing the monitoring tool through extensive research , consultation , data collection , and modelling . We ’ re doing this in collaboration with 11 ‘ pilot ’ cities , including one in Australia .
We ’ re about halfway through the project and just finished a phase in which we talked to academics and representatives from government , international organisations , not-for-profits , and the private sector , mostly about measures that could be used anywhere in the world and would still be relevant to a city interested in knowing whether the quality of life of their citizens was improving .
THE LINK BETWEEN ECONOMIC PROSPERITY , RESILIENCE AND COMMUNITY WELLBEING Some of the feedback from this process gave me pause for thought . It ’ s not the focus of the work , and so it ’ s not a statistically significant finding , but I picked up the idea that many economic development professionals working in local government will be experiencing quite a bit of scepticism from within their organisation about whether local government has a role in economic development .
From most interviewees ’ perspectives , economic prosperity , resilience , and self-sufficiency are essential foundations for community well-being and quality of life . Without the financial security these attributes bring to local businesses and households , underlying community stress diminishes the quality of life in a way that no number of parks , community events , neighbourhood watch programs , and libraries can fix .
Prosperity ensures we have the financial capacity to pay our mortgages , grocery bills , school fees and unexpected costs . Resilience means we have systems available to us that can kick in should our usual means of living break down . It means everything from having an alternative to your car to get to work ( you could ride a bike ), to a job market you can turn to if your organisation is on a redundancy drive . Self-sufficiency , in this context , means we are not overly dependent on far-flung suppliers , whether that is of jobs , consumables or other
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