Why do indicators have limited usefulness

The country reports produced by EHLEIS are well received by countries and increase the uptake of HLY at national level as the reports are published on countries websites. This is important to improve the understanding of the concept in a unified way and to provide a yearly update. Furthermore, the presentation and dissemination of HLY are most prominent on national statistics websites. The capacity is usually spread over various institutions being national public health institutes, statistics offices and universities.

Also outside the health domain, HLY are used in reports on social protection and inclusion as well as on disability and employment. The production and dissemination of HLY and the GALI follow already established procedures which confirm their institutionalisation, but has a decline in resources and capacity at EU — level as a consequence. Since only one respondent per country was aimed for in this study, due to resources constraints, the responses may have been incomplete and may not reflect a country wide perspective.

Also, the results from the study demonstrated that the areas in which the GALI and HLY are used can be broad and the respondents may only be aware of use in certain areas. However, the respondents were chosen due to their active participation in the EHLEIS network and their expertise in the field. Therefore, they seemed to be suitable to respond to the questionnaire. Participants were also asked to provide another contact person if they did not know the answers to the questionnaire.

Various respondents provided links to national reports and websites. Due to the language barrier not all reports could be assessed thoroughly. Additionally, HLY are increasingly being used to design policies and programmes. The GALI and HLY are not only used in the policy area of the health sector encompassing disabilities and healthy ageing, but have also gained importance in other fields such as retirement, budgets and sustainable development.

The GALI is integrated in major health surveys which support its long-term sustainability. This analysis encourages further documenting for the policy makers how HLY and the GALI are measured and what type of interpretation can be driven from the secular or cross-country comparisons.

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European Commisison. Social Protection Committee. Luxembourg; Sustainable development in the European Union A statistical glance from the viewpoint of the UN sustainable development goals. Luxembourg; [cited 10 Aug ]. Eurostat the statistical office of the EU. Eurostat metadat page on Healthy life years. European Commission.

Progress report on the implementation of the European disability strategy Leonardi M. Measuring health and disability: supporting policy development. Disabil Rehabil. Zaidi A, Unt M. The active ageing index: measuring successful aging at population level.

The Cambridge handbook of successful aging; Google Scholar. EurOhex Country Reports. Les nouveaux indicateurs de richesse HLY indicator. Stored Process Health Expectancy Statistics. Strategische Adviesraad Welzijn Gezondheid Gezin.

Voorstel voor een Vlaamse gezondheidsdoelstelling over het verkleinen van de sociale ongelijkheid in gezondheid en welzijn. Brussels; [cited 12 Feb ].

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Correspondence to Petronille Bogaert. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

It also has limited authority to pass detailed legislation in this policy field, which had been exclusively under state jurisdiction up until Although this has been formally changed, it has yet to have many practical consequences [ 89 ]. Common Tasks Topic 4 : Originally projected for the period up to , the report issued in was already skeptical about the achievement of the aims set by the Federal Program for Spatial Planning. At the same time, the report pointed out that the social and economic environment of federal spatial planning had changed, which required some reorientation: First, there had been an improvement in the level of infrastructure supply in backward regions.

Second, economic investment had declined which was interpreted as a need to put special emphasis on the creation of jobs - not only in rural areas but also in traditional industrial regions hit by the structural change in the economy. Third, declining birthrates were expected to require new forms of organization for infrastructure supply in sparsely populated areas [ 20 ]. As a consequence of the assumed convergence of regional living conditions and the new emphasis on economic development, there was a decline in salience of the notion of equivalent living conditions up until the report.

In terms of measuring equivalent living conditions, it should be noted that the definition of the 38 territorial units for federal spatial policy was met with criticism.

The report admitted that these units were too large to enable the identification of meaningful regional disparities [ 20 ]. Furthermore, the departmental planning units in the federal ministries used different territorial units for their own planning purposes, which made coordination between spatial planning and functional planning difficult. Unification Topic 3 : The reports published in and are clearly marked by Topic 3, which underlines different issues that become salient as a consequence of German reunification.

Unemployment rocketed due to the insolvency of many formerly state-owned companies that were not able to survive in an increasingly global capitalist environment. Although the sudden increase in regional disparities was an obvious issue during these years, their problematization in terms of the idea of equivalent living conditions only developed slowly. Figure 4. Evaluative words typically used to describe regional disparities.

Transnational Topic Topic 1 : Since the turn of the millennium there has been debate about what should count as equivalent from a regional perspective. In fact, the idea of equivalence has been interpreted by experts in contradictory ways [ 79 ]: At one end of the spectrum is the claim that the constitutional principle is meant to be a spatial expression of the welfare state, aiming to provide territorial equalization policies [ 90 ].

From to Art. Article 72 of the Basic Law regulates the legislative competence of the central state and the federal states and now grants the national legislature the right to issue laws that could overrule state laws if the equivalence of living conditions within the national territory is at risk.

However the competence of competing legislation at the federal level came at the price of replacing a strong notion of equality with the more ambiguous phrase of equivalent living conditions [ 85 ]. In order to trace this controversy in the Spatial Planning Report, we conducted frequency counts of nine nouns and adjectives that are typically used in the description and evaluation of regional living conditions Fig.

Their use in the Spatial Planning Report is remarkable in several respects. Such condensing of meaning into one single word might even be prerequisite before an idea can become politically more influential. This is probably due to the fact that, among the modifiers analyzed, it is usually perceived to be the most neutral one.

Hence, its frequent use can be interpreted as a strategy to increase the epistemic authority of the report and to leave normative questions to policymakers. Interestingly its use increases from onwards when responsibility for the report was taken over from the federal ministry by the federal spatial research institute BBSR.

The Spatial Planning Report from argues that the increase in the range of regional disparities following the German unification has made the idea of equivalent living conditions once again politically relevant. Indeed, Topic 1 contains several cues in this regard. Indeed, a declining birthrate and outmigration hit the eastern part of Germany hard as was the case in most formerly communist states. Uncertainty about the future caused delays in decisions to have children and, faced with a lack of job opportunities, many young and well-qualified people emigrated to the western part of Germany.

Declining population numbers made it increasingly expensive for the public sector to provide technical and social infrastructures which became ever more oversized in many places [ 93 ].

Cutbacks and school closures, for example, were the frequent responses by policymakers in shrinking regions, especially in the eastern part of Germany.

However shrinking regions coexist with urban growth areas. While suburban areas have long been a concern for spatial planning, an aging population presents a new facet. The young families that once moved to these areas very often became empty-nest households when their children moved out.

This age structure needs special attention when it comes to elderly-care planning. A similar vocabulary can be found in European regional development programs [ 68 ]. If we take into account that this is the period when the spatial planning office BBSR took over responsibility for the Spatial Planning Report from the federal ministry, it can be interpreted as an activating form of problematization addressed at policymakers. The ESDP envisaged metropolitan regions as nodes that connected Europe to other continents and increased its global competitiveness.

Since spatial development concepts in Germany always struggled with a tension between economic growth and regional equalization, the idea of developing metropolitan regions and their interconnectedness increased this tension. It added another layer to the traditional German hierarchy of central places. With a view of further enlarging the European Union, the European Commission also announced an economization of the programs for structural development policy in First, it proposed reducing the maximum share of population in funded regions of member states as well as the number of community initiatives [ 14 ].

The report reflects the translation of this global discourse into regional and local processes, identifying indicators for measuring progress towards sustainable development. This catalyzed the first attempt to operationalize the idea of equivalent living conditions in the report [ 13 ]. Several decisions need to be made in order to measure equivalent living conditions. From a methodological perspective, it has to be decided which dimensions are relevant, which indicators to use, which spatial units to observe and if cross-sectional or longitudinal observations are preferable.

From a political perspective, a measure for the normative evaluation of living conditions, a target, a target value or a threshold has to be defined. What counts as equivalent?

Should compensation between dimensions be allowed or not? Among the documents analyzed, the Spatial Planning Reports from and provide suggestions for an operationalization of equivalent living conditions and pick up potentially contentious aspects of — at first glance — purely methodological decisions.

The report from presents an operationalization of social and spatial justice as part of a national contribution to the global Agenda 21 process [ 13 ]. In this report, equivalent living conditions are equated with social and spatial justice and become one of three potentially conflicting dimensions in the concept of sustainable development.

The other two are economic competitiveness and environmental protection. The selection of these indicators is briefly made plausible, however the choices are presented as more obvious than contingent. The brevity in justifying the decisions made might be due to the fact that the indicator concept had already been presented to a meeting of the United Nations and was an updated version [ 13 ]. Subdimensions of social and spatial justice were conceptualized as non-substitutable and each subdimension was measured by one indicator.

Target values were meant to represent a minimum standard to be reached; otherwise there was an indication of a deficit in social and spatial justice or a lack of equivalence of living conditions. Target values were set as percentages of national averages with the exception of housing supply, which was compared to the average for the type of region based on the settlement structure. The definition of these target values was, in part, justified by reference to other conventions that had been defined politically e.

It contained a total of indicators in six dimensions and 67 subdimensions [ 94 ]. Data in the report from was normalized in order to be able to compare indicators of different subdimensions. Indicators with a deficit over the target value were used for calculating an average regional deficit. Cross-sectional data was used to assess regional disparities at one point in time, as well as the development of these disparities over a period of five years.

The magnitude of disparities was measured by the coefficient of variation and by counting the regions with a deficit. In , between 9 and 41 regions exhibited a deficit in one of the assessed subdimensions of justice. The report from operationalized equivalent living conditions using six subdimensions and 23 indicators, which were measured on the county level. Dimensions were presented as rather obvious; indicators were made plausible, for example, with regard to their practical relevance for political decision making.

The subdimensions were conceptualized as non-substitutable; an additive index was constructed for each subdimension, which meant that the values of individual indicators could compensate each other.

The construction of these additive indices was made possible by a Z-transformation of the data. The report interpreted the idea of equivalent living conditions as aiming to provide minimum standards across the national territory, an interpretation that is in line with the extensive recommendation of unitary indicators and thresholds by the Council for Spatial Planning from At the same time, the report quotes a more recent statement by the Council for Spatial Planning, which argued against uniform standards across the national territory and for spatially differentiated standards.

On the one hand, it can be assumed that this argument reflects the academic criticism, which bemoaned the fact that quantitative indicators might have different meanings depending on the regional context in question [ 95 , 96 ].

On the other hand, it reflects the fact that, in German federalism, the states, not the federal government, are responsible for spatial planning and hence for the definition of standards in the first place.

The federal government should only intervene if equivalence across the national territory is at stake. Yet, without a unitary national benchmark, it is not possible to evaluate that question because normative standards vary considerably across states. Fifteen of these counties were located in the eastern part of Germany and five in the western part.

When we compare the two operationalizations of equivalent living conditions briefly presented here, it becomes clear that there is a relatively stable consensus that economic development and participation in the labor market are crucial dimensions of this concept. Furthermore, the approach from is clearer in the sense that possible tensions between the dimensions of economic growth and justice are explicitly highlighted in the report.

At the same time, a policy instrument for monitoring and supporting economic development already existed in Germany, namely the Common Task targeting regional economic development. This means that there would have been a certain redundancy in monitoring and, consequently, in intervening. Against the backdrop of possible competition between the instruments of regional economic policy and a potential instrument targeting equivalent living conditions, the report from focused on the theme of safeguarding the provision of material and organizational infrastructure Daseinsvorsorge sichern.

This report was the first to officially choose a particular theme for the entire report. It referred to the idea of equivalent living conditions Fig. The report analyzed possible strategies for safeguarding the provision of material and organizational infrastructure across the national territory, a particular challenge in depopulating areas.

Hence it explicitly carved out a narrower policy focus than the measurement concepts presented in earlier reports that spanned several dimensions of living conditions. Moreover, compared to the early s, a recent discussion on equivalent living conditions has focused on how to keep from falling below a certain threshold instead of on increasing minimum standards [ 85 ].

A less encompassing thematic focus and a lower aspiration level might enhance the prospects for formalizing the idea of equivalent living conditions in a unitary way. One requirement of a unitary operationalization of equivalent living conditions would be a consensus on a relevant set of indicators among the crucial actors of German spatial planning policy, most notably the policy makers in the MKRO [ 96 ].

A step in this direction was made by an article that extensively sought to justify the setting of target values by referring to existing politically decided conventions in different policy fields [ 98 ].

However, the measurement suggestions proposed so far were not picked up by the federal Equivalent Living Conditions Commission. Yet, the commission explicitly supported a current initiative of the BBSR to develop a measurement concept of equivalent living conditions that should be used for regular monitoring.

The commission further stipulated that subjective indicators for life satisfaction should be analyzed with respect to their causal relevance for outmigration as part of this monitoring [ 99 ]. During the period under analysis, informal indicator use for representing the idea of equivalent living conditions in the Spatial Planning Report has shifted from analytical spatial categories towards a more individualized representation of territories.

While this representational change still supports a place-based framing of problems, it does not facilitate collective action to cope with those problems. In order to substantiate our argument, we specifically compare the two topics that dominate those periods in which the idea of equivalent living conditions is most salient: Topic 1 — and Topic 5 — We focus on the constellation of actors and on the localization of problems in both topics.

Figure 5. Number of figures, maps and tables per Spatial Planning Report — From the description above, it has become clear that Topic 5, the Federal Spatial Planning Program Topic, is mainly populated by national actors and their instruments. One exception to the national constellation of actors in Topic 5 is the projections of the agricultural land needed to self-sufficiently feed the German population.

These projections, made by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development as well as individual scientists like George E. Furthermore, matters pertaining to international relations and cooperation have been a regular part of all the reports since the very beginning. Table 2 , continued. Nevertheless, the salience of international actors, primarily the European Union and the United Nations, and their instruments in the more recent Transnational Topic Topic 1 is striking.

In this respect, the operationalization of the concept of sustainable development catalyzed attempts to formalize the idea of equivalent living conditions [ 13 ]. How about national actors? National actors are mentioned in the Transnational Topic, however their relative importance has declined relative to the Federal Spatial Planning Program Topic. A significant number of national actors in the Transnational Topic consists of the names of individual cities and states.

While the names of cities and states can be interpreted as representing political actors, they are also a way to localize problems, especially on maps. The Transnational Topic names 8 political territories and 5 analytical spatial categories, whereas the Federal Spatial Planning Program Topic names 2 political territories and 4 analytical spatial categories.

This individualizing way of localizing problems presents an alternative to the construction of analytical spatial categories. In addition to this, individualizing forms of localizing problems responsibilize local or regional actors rather than national ones.

Since the mids, depopulation, aging and problems related to spatial planning, such as school closures, have mainly occurred — though not exclusively — in the eastern part of Germany. In the analyzed reports, this localization is increasingly indicated through an individualizing representation of space names of cities and states instead of through analytical categories that could be connected more clearly to a need for federal intervention.

Why do we see this individualizing shift in the representation of space? In the first place, it seems to be the result of a change in the way quantitative results are presented to policymakers and the wider public in the Spatial Planning Report Fig. Simultaneously, it has the — probably unintended — consequences of mobilizing the individual agency of local governments while hampering the formation of space-based interest groups. Roughly speaking, the number of tables, maps and figures graphs — illustrative techniques that are typically used to highlight results — increased quite steadily during the period under observation up until , at which point they declined.

The report from is an exception because it contained an extensive annex that has not been published in a digital format. At the same time, from onwards, the proportion of maps has increased at the expense of tables and, to a lesser extent, at the expense of figures. This development was further boosted with the report issued in , when responsibility for the report was transferred from the ministry to the federal research institute BBSR.

The relative increase in the proportion of maps remains unchanged in the reports from and when the total number of illustrations decreased.

This observed shift in Spatial Planning Reports is no coincidence but seems to be part of a broader strategy of communicating policy advice in spatial planning [ ]. Maps are visual representations that can usually also be read by laymen in a very intuitive way. At the same time, the Spatial Planning Report typically uses political maps as a base layer for depicting descriptive or analytical results. Political maps divide space into territories with clearly marked borders and often also label the state capital.

In contrast, the construction of an analytical category would theoretically facilitate the establishment of interest groups that could lobby for the establishment of an indicator-based federal policy instrument favoring their interests [ 84 , ]. Against the backdrop of the increasingly ubiquitous use of indicators in society, this paper has sought to explain why this use has remained very limited when it comes to the guiding idea of equivalent living conditions in federal spatial policy in Germany.

The idea has regained political attention in recent years, but it has not yet been operationalized with an agreed upon set of indicators.

This is an especially interesting case because federal spatial planning is a policy field deeply imbued with indicators — typically produced by an expert organization that is concurrently exposed to both scientific and political expectations. Drawing primarily on arguments derived from actor-network theory, we assumed that indicators not only represent the world, but transform it by adding an objectifying description to it [ 45 ].

In the case of indicators that operationalize the rather ambiguous idea of equivalent living conditions, we assumed that it would convey a place-based problematization of regional disparities in a relatively broad range of dimensions, which could be formally associated with equalizing spatial policy schemes.

We heuristically distinguished between four different levels of formalizing the observation of and intervention into regional disparities informal use of indicators; explicit operationalization; explicit operationalization and regular monitoring; explicit operationalization and formal spatial intervention programs. We further assumed that indicators might compete with each other for political attention. In a competitive situation, indicators that represent well-defined or established concepts would be in a more advantageous position because they were associated with formal intervention programs than indicators that represent ambiguous or new concepts; indicators that have been integrated into causal models would be more influential than indicators that are merely descriptive.

In contrast, indicators representing more ambiguous concepts would more likely remain at a level of informal use. Empirically we have shown that the idea of equivalent living conditions has received considerable and controversial attention in the German parliament, while the Spatial Planning Report seems to have become a taken-for-granted source of information with trusted epistemic authority [ 10 ].

Why, then, have suggestions for measuring equivalent living conditions that were made in the reports from and not been taken up by the recent federal Commission on Equivalent Living Conditions?

In order to resolve this conundrum we analyzed the content of the Spatial Planning Report from to In short, the focus was on raising living standards for all citizens and it was paired with the significant confidence in the steering capacity of the nation state.

Economic structural change brought about a narrowing of federal spatial planning to regional economic policy from using GDP as the main intellectual tool of policy design. The political demand for equivalent living conditions did not reemerge until the s, after the German unification and in the face of growing regional disparities.

While it remained on a fairly low level during the s, it has become more manifest since This political debate can be interpreted in part as a result of the continuous objectifying monitoring of regional disparities in the Spatial Planning Report.

After the turn of the millennium, the idea of equivalent living conditions within the Spatial Planning Report became especially embedded in transnational developments such as European integration, global competition and the discourse on sustainable development. Especially the latter contributed to an explicit operationalization of the idea of equivalent living conditions.

We explain the limited formalization of the idea of equivalent living conditions, which has not exceeded the first level of formalization that we defined for analytical purposes, by the interplay of three different factors. First, the rather ambiguous idea of equivalent living conditions faced competition from the more narrow idea of economic growth, which could count on the well-established GDP indicator [ 67 ]. Second, the assignment of the responsibility for the Spatial Planning Report at the BBSR strengthened its scientific independence but also brought about less formalized forms of communicating analytical results to political addressees.

This informal way of policy formulation seems to be highly compatible with the entanglement of competences in German federalism [ 65 ]. Third, transnational issues and actor constellations, in particular the importance of indicators in the global discourse on sustainable development, catalyzed the explicit operationalization of the idea of equivalent living conditions in which was followed by a second proposal of formalization in A possible caveat to the proposals for operationalizing the idea of equivalent living conditions presented so far might be that both included economic indicators, in other words they would have built up a certain redundancy with existing regional economic policy programs had they become formally related to equalizing policy programs.

Regional economic policy is quite a firmly established policy field that has recently become even more integrated in Germany [ ]. Instead, a complementary set of indicators might avoid such competition, which is usually not only competition between indicators but also between the academic professions related to them. Against this competitive backdrop it remains to be seen whether a stronger formalization of regional policy instruments that measure and monitor equivalent living conditions can be reached as proposed by the Equivalent Living Conditions Commission.

The current translation of the Sustainable Development Goals to a national strategy for sustainable development does not seem to place great emphasis on subnational spatial disparities [ ].

Yet, two factors might strengthen such an endeavor: First, starting in the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions EU-SILC will contain indicators on subjective life satisfaction, allowing for causal analysis on a regional scale across member countries [ 99 ]. Hence, results from this type of analysis might strengthen a closer integration of national equalization policies on living conditions with EU territorial cohesion policy.

Second, the apparent resilience of the fairly decentralized German healthcare system during the current Corona pandemic could also encourage a more formalized focus on the regional provision of public infrastructure. The limited formalization of the idea of equivalent living conditions does not mean that the concept has no influence at all. Instead it seems to have a conceptual influence as demonstrated by the thematic focus of the Spatial Planning Report of on assuring minimum standards of infrastructure in especially sparsely populated and remote areas, and the official justification for initiating the federal Equivalent Living Conditions Commission [ 82 ].

What do we learn from this case study that we can apply to official statistics in the future? We would like to briefly sketch a few thoughts on the use of indicators. First, the use of indicators in the Spatial Planning Report shows that their visualization — especially in maps — is an important aspect that should not be overlooked with respect to their conceptual influence.

Second, data from geographical information systems GIS will become even more important for spatial research in the future. Enhancing the interoperability of statistics that are based on administrative territorial units and GIS data appears essential.

However, it will be necessary to create specialized research capacities — within statistical offices or in cooperation with other actors — to point research and development in this direction. Lorri King kindly took care of the copy editing. Any remaining shortcomings can be exclusively attributed to the authors. Radermacher WJ. Ho J-M.

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