Andrew Sharpe: Pioneer in the Measurement of Economic Well-Being
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Andrew Sharpe: Pioneer in the Measurement of Economic Well-Being Andrew Sharpe 1 # The International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) and Springer Nature B.V. 2020
The measurement of economic well-being has been an important part of my professional career as an economist. In this short biography I will focus on some of the highlights. My studies started in the field of geography receiving a BA from the University of Toronto in 1973 and a maitrise from the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne in 1974. Discovering the importance of economics while in Paris, I then switched to this discipline, receiving a MA and PhD in economics from McGill University in 1978 and 1982 respectively. I then took a position in Canada’s Ministry of Finance, rising to the position of Chief, Business Sector Analysis. In 1987, I joined the Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre (CLMPC), a bipartite non-governmental body as Director of Research. In 1995, I left the CLMPC to found the Centre for the Study of Living Standards (CSLS), a small, not-for-profit economic research organization based in Ottawa, Canada focusing on living standards, productivity, labour market, economic wellbeing and Indigenous issues. Twenty-five years later, I am still the Executive Director
* Andrew Sharpe [email protected]
1
Centre for the Study of Living Standards, Ottawa, ON, Canada
A. Sharpe
of this organization. The CSLS has never had core funding so we have lived on project funding from a wide variety of sources. Survival has been a challenge at times, but always an invigorating one! In this article I will focus on the economic well-being component of my work at the CSLS.1 I have always had an empirical bent, loving the challenge of bringing together many data series to paint a big picture of what is happening. I have also had a keen interest in living standards and economic well-being. In the mid-1990s it was already recognized that GDP was a vastly imperfect metric of economic well-being, There were then some, but relatively few, composite indexes of well-being that went beyond GDP, the UNDP’s Human Development Index being the best known example. Consequently, I decided that one of the first projects of the CSLS would be the development of a composite measure of economic well-being. Lars Osberg, a Professor of Economics at Dalhousie University and one the founding members of the CSLS Board of Directors, had been asked in the mid1980s by the MacDonald Commission to develop a conceptual framework for the measurement of economic well-being. The article, published in 1985 (Osberg 1985) is in my view a seminal contribution to the well-being literature. Osberg made that case that economic well-being consists of four major domains, namely consumption flows, stocks of wealth, economic equality, and economic security, each domain in turn based on a number of indicators (28 in total). Since Osberg had not developed actual estimates for his framework, the two of us teamed up in the mid-1990s to put empirical meat on the conceptual bones of what
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