Read the article Rise and Fall of the GDP in the New York Times Magazine. The author Jon Gertner attended a presentation on the Canadian Index of Well-Being presented by Alex Michalos, a former chancellor at the University of Northern British Columbia.
The presentation on the Canadian Index of Well Being is available here. Michalos’ interesting approach discusses how the success of a country depends on collaborations with international organizations such as Stats Canada, OECD etc.
The OECD has just launched a new page that it is calling “Statistical Narratives.” The aim of this page is to feature select statistical tables – usually from a topical subject – and present them with a brief explanatory article. The result? A sort of news feature mashed up with supporting data. The articles are readable and go a long way to providing context for the statistics. OECD hopes that the page will “build knowledge from statistics, as well as give users a sense of what statistics are available from the OECD.”
Well, this find seemed topical. There is a G8 research group at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. The group maintains a very useful website: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/ which provides access to a large chunk of the group’s analysis and reports. Monographs published by commercial publishers are not available online.
The site also links to available “Delegations; declaration and communiqués; other official releases; documents released by national delegations at summits; available transcripts of summit news conferences” for G8 & G7 summits dating back to the 1975 Summit in Rambouillet.