Measuring What Matters: A Systematic Review of Social Service Coverage in Beyond-GDP Indicators
Le résumé fourni par la source
The Beyond-GDP movement has produced sophisticated frameworks for measuring national progress, yet no systematic assessment has examined whether these frameworks adequately capture social services – the interventions through which welfare states improve citizens’ lives. This paper addresses that gap through meta-analysis of 66 Beyond-GDP indicators developed between 1972 and 2023, mapped against a 22-domain taxonomy using keyword-based content analysis with wholeword matching. Our findings reveal a fundamental asymmetry in measurement development. Health (86%), Knowledge & Skills (80%), Material Wellbeing (77%), Work & Job Quality (73%), and Economic Security (70%) demonstrate comprehensive coverage reflecting decades of methodological investment. Care services, by contrast, appear in only 17% of indicators, dropping to just 6% in the full database of 209 indicators. This nearly threefold decrease represents the most severe measurement gap identified, confirming that care for children, persons with disabilities, and elderly individuals remains largely invisible in progress measurement. Service integration (11%) and prevention (6%) prove similarly neglected. Co-occurrence analysis reveals these gaps are structural rather than incidental. Care services achieve below 20% integration with established measurement clusters, compared with above 70% among core economic and social domains. This isolation indicates that expanding existing frameworks will not organically incorporate care; deliberate architectural redesign is required. Methodological limitations compound content gaps: only 12% of frameworks support intersectional analysis, disability disaggregation appears in just 12% of indicators, and publication lags averaging 18 months constrain policy responsiveness. These findings establish that Beyond-GDP measurement, despite substantial conceptual progress, inadequately captures dimensions central to welfare state investment, providing an evidence base for developing more comprehensive social service evaluation frameworks.
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