Abstract
The OECD report COVID-19 and Wellbeing: Life in the Pandemic explores the immediate implications of the pandemic for people's lives and livelihoods in OECD countries. The report charts the course of wellbeing using data collected during the first 12-15 months of the pandemic. It shows how COVID-19 has had far-reaching consequences for how we live, work, and connect with one another. It also shows how experiences of the pandemic varied widely, depending on whether and where people work, their gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, and income levels. The report also examines the role that wellbeing evidence can play a part in supporting governments' pandemic recovery efforts. It argues that a wellbeing lens can prompt policymakers to refocus on the outcomes that matter the most to people, to redesign policy content from a more multidimensional perspective, to realign policy practice across government silos, and to reconnect people with the public institutions that serve them.
Video recording
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Transcript
Dominick Stephens (00:00:03):
[speaking in te reo Māori] I tēnei rā. E tautoko ana i te ako. Ngā mihi nui ki a Carrie Exton. Te kai kōrero te ra.Tēnā koe Carrie.
Dominick Stephens (00:00:12):
Hi, everyone. I'm Dominick Stephens, Chief Economic Advisor at the Treasury, and I'd like to welcome you all to this Treasury Guest Lecture Series seminar. It's awesome to see such a great turnout in here, the second speaker in our Wellbeing Seminar Series. So last month, the Secretary to the Treasury, Caralee McLiesh, publicly launched a broad wellbeing work programme that will culminate in the Wellbeing Report at the end of this year. Te Tai Waiora is going to be a report on the state of wellbeing, how that's evolved over time, how it's distributed in New Zealand, and the sustainability of that wellbeing. And we see this seminar series, for us, it's part of a really broad work programme that's all going to lead to the Wellbeing Report over time. Of course, we'd like to bring external ideas as a source of challenge and intellectual stimulation for that process, and of course, we'd really like to share the insights that international experts have to offer around New Zealand, to perhaps broaden the conversation on wellbeing in New Zealand. So, we'll have a range of these seminars over the rest of 2022 and early '23 from international and New Zealand. So today, we're very lucky to have Carrie Exton with us from the OECD. Carrie Exton leads the Wellbeing Data Insights and Policy Practice Team at the OECD Centre for Wellbeing, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunity, or known as WISE. The team helps build the evidence base for WISE policy making, including the development of frameworks and indicators in their role in supporting government decisions. Caralee was... Two names that are too similar. I do apologise. Carrie was previously based in the OECD statistics and data directorate and has more than a decade of experience in developing and analysing measures of wellbeing. Prior to joining the OECD, Carrie worked as a policy advisor in the UK Civil Service, including roles in strategy, private office, higher education, research, and science policy, and the apprenticeships unit.
Dominick Stephens (00:02:28):
Today, Carrie is sharing findings from the OECD report, COVID-19 and Wellbeing: Life in the Pandemic. The report explores the immediate implications of the pandemic for people's lives and livelihoods in OECD countries, and how the experience of the pandemic has varied for different people. It also examines the role that wellbeing evidence can play in supporting government's pandemic recovery efforts. And this is really relevant to us in New Zealand, I was just chatting to Carrie before about how we at the Treasury have recently released the trends report on wellbeing evolution over 20 years in New Zealand, and we are seeking additional data and information on how COVID has affected wellbeing in New Zealand more recently.
Dominick Stephens (00:03:14):
So, I'm really excited to have Carrie here with us today. The other thing to note, of course, is that it's six in the morning at present for Carrie, and she's joining us from the UK, so we're sort of extra grateful for the effort that you're making, Carrie. Carrie's going to present for 40 to 45 minutes, and then we'll have the remainder of the time for questions and discussions, so feel free to pop questions into the chat during the presentation for me to mediate at the end and ask Carrie when we turn to question time. So without further ado, over to you, Carrie.
Carrie Exton (00:03:52):
Thanks very much, Dominick, for the very kind introduction. It's a really great pleasure to be with you this afternoon. So, I think my slides are just going to start appearing very soon. Here we go. That showing up all right for you, Dominick?
Dominick Stephens (00:04:14):
That's perfect. That looks absolutely perfect.
Carrie Exton (00:04:17):
Excellent. Okay. So, as you've already heard today, I'm going to be talking about a report that the OECD published very recently called “COVID-19 and Wellbeing: Life in the Pandemic”. So, this report is really our attempt to view the experience of the pandemic through a wellbeing lens, and I will spend the rest of the presentation really explaining what we mean when we say viewing an experience through a wellbeing lens. As you know, I'm sure all too well, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on just about every aspect of people's lives, so how we work, how we live, how we connect with one another, and crucially, the pandemic very quickly snowballed from a public health crisis to an international economic and social crisis. So, given this, in the report, we set out to look at how the pandemic has impacted people's lives across a really wide array of wellbeing outcomes. So, from jobs and incomes, through to social connections, health, including mental health, work-life balance, education and more, and we're doing this using data collected through the first 12 to 15 months of the pandemic. So, the first thing to explain is that the report uses the OECD's Wellbeing Framework as its guiding structure. So, this framework is something that we developed over 10 years ago now in the OECD, and we use this framework to underpin our regular “How's Life?” series of reports. So, those reports chart the progress of OECD countries across the many dimensions of wellbeing, inclusion, and sustainability that you see on this slide. So, we cover economic, social, relational, and environmental outcomes today, as well as the resources that sustain them over time.
Carrie Exton (00:06:11):
And you can see here from this slide that our approach is truly multidimensional, so it's covering a wide variety of living conditions. So, under current wellbeing, you see material conditions, quality of life like health, knowledge, and skills, environmental quality, and relational aspects of wellbeing, like social connections. It's important to say upfront that our approach includes many objective measures of people's living conditions, but we also include some data about how people themselves evaluate and experience their own lives. So, it's a mixture of objective and subjective, but I would probably say that the majority of our indicators are objective in nature. So, on the top right of this slide, you can see that we have a strong emphasis... So, I'm seeing some messages saying you're only seeing the front slide at the moment.
Carrie Exton (00:07:08):
Dominick, could you confirm, are you still just seeing my cover slide at the moment?
Dominick Stephens (00:07:12):
There seems to be some form of technical difficulty whereby each participant can move the slides themselves, and it's not synced to you. So, I do apologise for that, Carrie, and I think the easiest solution, if all of the participants agree, is that you just tell us we're now on slide four. Would that work for you, Carrie?
Carrie Exton (00:07:38):
That works, or I wonder actually, if the Treasury team want to take back control, and I will just mention when the slides should advance. I mean, it sounds like a fun experiment, have everybody run the slides.
Dominick Stephens (00:07:48):
Yeah, not technical.
Carrie Exton (00:07:50):
[inaudible 00:07:50].
Michelle Cornish (00:07:50):
No, I can do that for you.
Dominick Stephens (00:07:50):
Okay.
Michelle Cornish (00:07:52):
I can do that for you, Carrie, and I'll do it now.
Carrie Exton (00:07:53):
Wonderful. Thanks, Michelle.
Dominick Stephens (00:07:54):
Okay. So, we're on slide three at the moment.
Carrie Exton (00:07:57):
We are indeed.
Dominick Stephens (00:07:58):
Great.
Carrie Exton (00:08:09):
Okay. Hopefully you're all seeing the OECD Wellbeing Framework, and I hope that my comments were making sense, even if you weren't seeing this in front of you. So, I think I was just about to launch into the top right hand section of this slide, which is all about our inclusion measures. So, as well as looking at national averages across all of these different domains of people's lives, we look at several different aspects of the distribution of wellbeing outcomes. So, we look at inequalities between groups, so by gender, by age, by education. The COVID-19 report actually includes race and ethnicity, Indigenous communities. We have tried to also look at different occupation groups where possible, different income groups where possible, but obviously, all these different slices make for a very long report, so we've been a little bit selective, and the data actually are very limited, in many of these cases.
Carrie Exton (00:09:05):
We also have general measures of inequality, so a general measure of dispersion, looking at the size of the gap between people at the bottom of the distribution, and people at the top of the distribution. And finally, we also look at deprivation, so the share of the population falling below a certain level on each wellbeing dimension. Finally, underpinning all of this is the more systemic resources that support people's wellbeing over time, and in the OECD context, we group these resources under natural capital, human capital, economic capital, and social capital. And again, to the extent possible, this report also includes the impact of the pandemic on these long-term resources, which I think is quite important, if you want to understand what's the likely long-term impact of the crisis that we've been living through. So, next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:10:04):
The second general point to make before we get into the meat of the report itself is just to emphasise the data challenge when we're trying to assess the impact of COVID-19 on wellbeing across 38 OECD countries. So, over the course of the crisis, wellbeing outcomes have been a moving target, as both disease risk and restrictions have ebbed and flowed over time, and in the rush to meet new information needs, and the difficulty of collecting data during the pandemic, has posed new issues around data quality. So, we've got a large quantity of data about the pandemic because everybody sort of recognised the need for more information, but there is always a trade-off there with the kind of quality that you can produce in a short timeframe.
Carrie Exton (00:10:54):
This has placed a real premium on the high quality, high frequency, large sample data collections that are typical of most economic indicators that the OECD monitors, but are really rare in the case of social, relational, and environmental outcomes. So, we've got a real disparity in terms of the availability of data across our Wellbeing Framework, and inevitably in a short timeframe, a lot of the best data we have is economic data. This is a longstanding challenge for the OECD work on wellbeing, and it's something that we've been working on with national statistical offices for many, many years now, but I think the pandemic really brought home the importance of having baseline data, so something pre-pandemic to compare things to, and the importance of high frequency, high quality, large sample data. We did see many innovations in data collection across OECD countries during the pandemic, and throughout the report, you'll see little case studies that are showcased in boxes, looking at these innovative methodologies.
Carrie Exton (00:12:05):
So, unlike many OECD reports, we have often zoomed in on data that's specific to just one or two countries, to try and demonstrate what could be done, rather than necessarily requiring that we have data for all 38 OECD countries, before we include it in the report. So, we've been a lot more flexible with this report than we have been typically in the past, although obviously, one of the key value adds of the OECD is the country comparisons. So, we have also really focused on where we've got comparative data, even when there's a risk of weaker data quality under the circumstances. So next, slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:12:49):
Moving on to the results of the report, the first thing to say is just how extensive the impacts of the pandemic have been right across people's lives. So, every dimension of our Wellbeing Framework has a story to tell here, I really can't do full justice to that this afternoon, but I'm going to share some key findings on the slides that follow. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:13:12):
So, if we're going to talk about the human cost of the crisis, we've got to, first of all, acknowledge the grave loss of life caused by the pandemic. Deaths increased by 16% on average across OECD countries between March 2020 and May 2021, and that led to a seven month fall in life expectancy, in 2020 alone. So, you can see from this slide that OECD members in Latin America, so Mexico, Columbia, Chile, experienced particularly high loss of life in the first 14 months of the pandemic, with Czech Republic, Poland, Slovak Republic, and the United States running shortly behind them. At the other end of the spectrum, we have some of the Nordic states, as well as a few islands, so notably Iceland, Australia, and of course, New Zealand. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:14:06):
The health impacts obviously were not limited to physical health. So, mental health also suffered, with one in four people at risk of depression or anxiety by late 2020, in the 15 OECD countries where we have data. So, among the countries where we have baseline data, which is extremely rare for mental health outcomes, the incidence of depression and anxiety symptoms at least have doubled in most of those countries, so in Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States.
Carrie Exton (00:14:35):
While the economy has been recovering since that first precipitous fall in the second quarter of 2020 for the OECD on average, loneliness in the share of people who are feeling left out of society have been high, but also rising as the pandemic has progressed. So, despite restrictions easing over the course of the first 12 to 15 months of the pandemic, we've actually seen a worsening in terms of loneliness and feelings of being left out. So, by early 2021, one in five people reported feeling lonely, and that's up from one in seven, during the first wave of the pandemic, and one in three people felt left out of society, and that's a much higher number than when this was measured in 2016. So, this is European data, because we don't have comparable data beyond Europe on these indicators. Next slide, please. Another important thing to highlight is that as the pandemic has worn on, more and more people have been feeling worn out. So, in early 2021, nearly one third of people reported feeling too tired after work to do necessary household chores, with higher rates among women, younger adults, and particularly among those struggling financially. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:15:56):
So, across OECD countries, we saw really extensive government support that played an important role in protecting average incomes, and helped to stem the tide of unemployment across OECD. Nevertheless, economic insecurity has remained high. So, in mid-2020, one in seven people in European OECD countries felt they were likely to lose their jobs in the next three months, more than a quarter of people in 34 OECD countries were unemployed, discouraged or marginally employed in mid-2020. And towards the end of 2020 around one in three people reported experiencing at least one financial difficulty since the start of the pandemic. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:16:41):
Of course, the pandemic disrupted working lives as well as personal lives. And in particular, the type of job you do had a really big impact on both your disease risk and the extent to which you could continue working at all during the pandemic. Next slide. Please.
Carrie Exton (00:16:59):
So, in the OECD on average, younger workers were twice as likely to lose their jobs in the first quarter of the pandemic. This overall pattern predates the pandemic in the sense that most OECD countries, younger workers have a much higher risk of unemployment, generally. This figure itself focuses on the percentage point change between 2019 and 2020, so it's showing that that pre-pandemic pattern was accentuated by the COVID-19 crisis. So again, the phrase that many people have been using the pandemic deepened the inequalities that we already knew existed prior to the pandemic. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:17:39):
I think this one goes without saying, but it's worth just putting some numbers on it. So, hospitality and the arts were particularly hard-hit sectors, as you can see, both in terms of joblessness, hours worked per employee, and the share of people who were on furlough schemes, so working zero hours, but receiving at least part of their salary. We saw particularly large decreases in total hours worked in the accommodation and food sectors, and in the arts. For those sectors where teleworking was possible, and actually, it's possible to do a lot of things remotely, such as financial and insurance, and information and communication, we actually saw a net gain in the total hours worked, because the amount of joblessness actually reduced. So, we saw an increase in the number of jobs, and we saw relatively few people furloughed and very few people losing hours of work. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:18:40):
So, a really important piece of data for us is showing that while higher earners often had the capability of working from home, lower earning employees very often had to stop working altogether. So, this slide just shows the share of employees working from home, in the workplace, or who stopped working, and it's divided by income quartile. Sorry, this is a very complex figure, but essentially, when you see first, that means the bottom income quartile, and fourth is the top income quartile. So, you can see that the capability to work from home is vastly greater for people in higher income quartiles, and you can also see that the probability of stopping work is much higher for those on lower incomes. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:19:33):
I should also just mention that it's estimated within Europe, at least, that only 25% of jobs are teleworkable, and the proportion of jobs with tasks amenable to remote working appears to be much higher in cities and capital regions, than it is in rural areas. So, while we've had a lot of focus on the experiences of teleworkers, we really should not forget that teleworkers are in the minority, and they generally represent the most privileged groups of workers to begin with.
Carrie Exton (00:20:05):
So, this one is really stating the obvious, but for those who were lucky enough to be able to telework during the pandemic, school closures in particular, brought some challenges for parents. So, we've got a few data points here, both for the United States, and also for European Union countries. I think probably the most important thing to highlight is the evidence that women carried a much greater share of the burden here. So for example, in the United States, 36% of teleworking mothers reported heavy childcare duties, compared to only 16% of teleworking fathers. So, these are people in the same household teleworking, but quite different experiences of work that is unpaid outside the home. Again, what I would emphasise is it is very consistent with pre-pandemic trends. So, in OECD countries, on average, women spend two hours per day, that's per day, more than men, on unpaid work. So, this gender divide is not a new phenomenon, but to some extent, again, the circumstances of the pandemic accentuated it in some households. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:21:19):
One important thing to mention also is that teleworking did provide some opportunities for better work-life balance, for those who were juggling household unpaid tasks, alongside their paid work. So again, a couple of stats here. 32% of teleworkers with children under 12 reported that their job prevents them from spending time with family, but that figure is higher among those who work outside the home, at 38%. So, this is quite a small difference, and that's still a lot of people who are reporting that their job is interfering with their work-life balance, but it's still better for people who telework. 38% of teleworkers in the United States also said it's now easier for them to balance work with family responsibilities, than before the pandemic.
Carrie Exton (00:22:07):
Teleworking also has a variety, if you take a wider wellbeing perspective, teleworking has a variety of benefits in terms of eliminating commuting, which we know is associated with lower subjective wellbeing. It eliminates the contribution that commuting makes to pollution, congestion, carbon emissions. What I should've also included on this slide is potentially the detriment that we might experience to our social connectedness when teleworking. So, one of the reasons I haven't got it on this slide is that this is not something where we have good data. So, there might be some rare studies looking at loneliness at work during the pandemic, but we really lack baseline data to compare that to. So, intuitively, there's been a lot of people with quite a lot of concern about the harm that we're doing to our social capital and our social connectedness, by all being spread remotely. But in terms of evidence, that's really hard to come by, certainly for OECD countries in a comparable way. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:23:16):
So consistent with the OECD's overall wellbeing approach, our report has a strong emphasis on inclusion and equality of opportunity, and where possible, we've considered outcomes by gender, by age, by education, income, race, ethnicity, and more. And again, just to emphasise that the overall pattern here is that the crisis very often hit people who were already struggling the hardest. That said, we've also seen some new vulnerabilities opening up. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:23:48):
So very few OECD countries collect systematic data on wellbeing by race and ethnicity, but in those that do, we've seen some striking gaps. So for example, COVID- 19 mortality rates for some ethnic minority communities have been more than twice those of other groups, while ethnic minority workers have been more likely to lose their jobs during the pandemic. Mental health has deteriorated across almost all population groups on average in 2020, where we've got data, but gaps in mental health by race and ethnicity are also visible.
Carrie Exton (00:24:22):
I should note here too, that typically disadvantage accumulates and intersects in ways that are not easy to map with the data that we have. So this can understate the way that wellbeing challenges can pile up and accumulate for some groups of people. For example, the relationship between wellbeing, race and ethnicity is complex and a broader range of socioeconomic factors, including living and working conditions, as well as deep-seated forms of racism and discrimination can help to explain why some racial and ethnic communities have experienced really divergent outcomes during COVID-19. I don't have a slide on this, but I should say that the report includes some limited data on indigenous communities, notably in Australia, Canada, Columbia, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States. The data that we could find most easily concern the COVID-19 incidents and deaths rather than wider wellbeing outcomes. The exception there is Canada, where we've got data that indicate mental health burden was much higher for indigenous groups compared to non-indigenous groups.
Carrie Exton (00:25:32):
When it comes to the experience of COVID-19 itself, there are some striking disparities. So in the United States, for example, American Indian or Alaska natives faced 1.5 times the risk of catching COVID, 3.5 times the risk of hospitalisation, and more than twice the risk of death compared to the White population in the United States. In New Zealand, up until February 2021, case rates were actually lower among Māori than in the general population.
Carrie Exton (00:26:09):
However, data through to September 2020 indicated 2.5 times higher risk of hospitalisation compared to non-Māori and non-Pacifica population groups. So I'm well aware that data in New Zealand on indigenous groups is much better than in many, many OECD countries. So it's a little odd, me talking to you about this because I think you are probably all much greater experts than I am, but I did just want to say that within the OECD we are now trying to the extent we possibly can, certainly within the WISE Centre, we are trying to include indigenous groups whenever we are trying to look at the inclusion of wellbeing outcomes.
Carrie Exton (00:26:51):
So this is new and challenging territory from an international comparable perspective because of course, indigenous groups across OECD countries face very, very different challenges, very, very different policy environments, have very, very different historical background factors. So it's not easy to make these comparisons, but we are really keen to start incorporating these data wherever we can. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:27:17):
So another important disparity to really spotlight is that younger adults have seen some of the largest declines in mental health, social connectedness, and life satisfaction, as well as significant job disruption during the pandemic. So data from 12 OECD countries suggests that up to four in every 10 young adults were at risk of anxiety and depression during 2020 or the first half of 2021.
Carrie Exton (00:27:45):
So it remains to be seen how quickly this will recover in the new normal of living with COVID-19, but it's really important to keep monitoring this closely and not to stop collecting data just because pandemic restrictions have been mostly lifted. So as I mentioned before, we saw a lot of innovation in terms of data collection during the pandemic and actually, several statistical offices started collecting mental health data for the first time.
Carrie Exton (00:28:12):
And a really important message on our side is that we shouldn't stop collecting these data just because the policy environment is moving on from the pandemic. In particular, there are many factors that drive mental health that will have a long time lag in terms of the impact that the pandemic has. So we really do need to keep monitoring this and not assume that now that the policy environment is going back to a new normal, that all of these outcomes are going to rapidly snap back. We have quite some fears, particularly on the mental health front. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:28:53):
So last thing to say on this one is that housing conditions and how we live together, who we live with took on a really new significance for wellbeing during the pandemic. So school and daycare closures combined with the strains of the pandemic have taken a significant toll on the wellbeing of parents with young children. I guess if there are any parents with young children on the call, I think they'll know exactly what I'm saying.
Carrie Exton (00:29:17):
So couples with kids at home actually had the highest levels of life satisfaction pre-pandemic in 2019 in OECD countries, but they experienced some of the largest falls during 2020. At the same time, those living alone or as single parents have been more likely to struggle with issues of loneliness. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:29:43):
So many of the impacts on current wellbeing that I've just described are relatively intuitive and probably resonate with a lot of people's experiences. And they perhaps aren't particularly surprising given the amount of illness and loss, as well as economic and social disruption that's been experienced during the pandemic in many, many OECD countries, but it's important to reflect too on what's been happening to those longer-term stocks of resources that support wellbeing over time. So we often hear a lot in terms of recovery, on spending on physical infrastructure to stimulate the economy, but our report also emphasises the need to reinvest in our social infrastructure during the recovery. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:30:26):
So for example, the stocks of human capital that OECD countries have been accumulating over time will need strengthening following the crisis. So the pandemic reversed the decade long decrease in the number of youth not in education, employment, or training. This is really concerning because it's a reversal of what was a really positive trend happening in OECD countries. And we can see here that there are a number of OECD countries where the NEET levels between the second quarter of 2019, the second quarter of 2020 really went up by a significant margin. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:31:10):
So the pandemic upended people's lives and caused many changes in people's habits. Some of these were positive. For example, one in five people in OECD countries reported exercising more, but on average, more people adopted more unhealthy rather than healthy behaviours. So one in four people exercise less, 12% said they consumed more alcohol. I'm just looking at this slide. That's quite different numbers you are getting to the words. I think my slides have jumped here. So ignore the percentages that you're seeing on these slides because they're not aligned.
Carrie Exton (00:31:46):
So I think the other thing to say is that the pandemic also really deepened the socioeconomic divides in health-related behaviours that we already know exist, and put more deprived groups at greater risk of ill-health in the long run. So again, this is one of those classic examples really, of the pandemic being experienced in very, very different ways by different groups of people.
Carrie Exton (00:32:12):
So some people were lucky enough to be able to telework, gained better work-life balance and were focused on improving their health. Some people faced a workload that they've never seen in their lives before, were at very high risk of exposure to disease. And some groups of people also found it much harder to maintain healthy behaviours during the stress of the pandemic. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:32:44):
So another important and concerning trend for us is the signs that social capital has been eroded in a number of OECD countries as the pandemic has progressed. So while early on, we heard many heartwarming anecdotes about communities coming together and supporting each other, as time has passed and the realities of the pandemic have become clearer, and in particular, the reality that different people have experienced the pandemic in vastly different ways, a majority of adults now feel that their countries are more divided than before the crisis hit.
Carrie Exton (00:33:22):
And you can see in particular that, that trend is very powerful in the United States, Netherlands, Germany, Spain. We see slightly less strong divisions in Sweden, United Kingdom, Japan, but this is data up until 2021. It'd be very interesting again, if these data are continually monitored, we'll be able to look at what the last year or so has done to this trend. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:33:54):
So after an initial boost at the start of the pandemic, trust in government, the police and media started to edge down slowly between April, May 2020 and January, February 2021. So the data on this slide refer to European OECD countries, but evidence from non-European OECD countries also suggest that trust in government has started moving back to baseline levels in early 2021. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:34:23):
So what about New Zealand then? For this audience, I think I would be a fool to try and tell you something about wellbeing in New Zealand that you don't already know, and I'm very conscious there've been some excellent Treasury reports published very recently that have looked at these trends. So I'm really not going to do a deep dive, but I'll just highlight one or two findings. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:34:47):
So this is really just to advertise that on the back of the report, we've created country profiles for every OECD country. And of course, that means New Zealand too. This was quite difficult to do because a lot of the interesting data featured in the report, as I mentioned earlier, are quite specific to either one country or they cover only a small range of countries. At best, they might be Europe-wide.
Carrie Exton (00:35:11):
So in these profiles, we've really selected just a couple of key statistics where we've got the best data coverage across countries, which means that selection has been driven by data availability as much as it's been driven by what's truly interesting, but what we have really tried to do is not exclusively focus on the economic indicators that are overwhelmingly available. So we've really tried with the country profiles to still show the balance across the wellbeing framework. So looking at material wellbeing, quality of life, relational wellbeing, sustainability, rather than only going where the best data are.
Carrie Exton (00:35:47):
I'm afraid even with this real narrowing of indicators, in the case of New Zealand, we are missing comparable data in many of the domains that we've featured in the country profiles. So that includes mental health, loneliness, feeling left out, income, several data points across our four capitals. And in those cases we've still left in the OECD average result in the country profile, so that you've at least got some information rather than no information.
Carrie Exton (00:36:13):
Sometimes this is about comparability. So New Zealand might have data, but it will not be data that is collected in a way that's comparable with other OECD countries who are also collecting similar data. Sometimes it's about a time lag. So on the income data, I think it's purely about the speed with which we receive New Zealand income data. That means we can't put it in the same trend line as the other OECD countries. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:36:39):
So what data do we have for New Zealand? Well, one of the key indicators for the OECD during the pandemic was a new measure that we created called excess mortality. So the pandemic prompted us to generate these statistics for the first time. You won't be surprised to learn that excess mortality in New Zealand was significantly lower than the OECD average at almost every point between March 2020 and May 2021.
Carrie Exton (00:37:06):
So over this period, while the OECD as a whole experienced 16% higher death rates than normal, when I say normal, I mean, on average, across the four preceding years, and this is seasonally adjusted, so OECD was 16% higher than normal. New Zealand deaths were just 2% higher than normal. Although you can see that New Zealand starts edging closer to the OECD average in the second quarter of 2021.
Carrie Exton (00:37:40):
On the right, we have another key OECD measure, which is labour underutilization. So this is a measure that captures both the unemployed and marginally attached workers. So these are people who want to work, but don't necessarily meet the very strict criteria that the OECD operates for the criteria of unemployment. So we've got unemployed, we've got marginally attached workers. We've also got underemployed in this figure. So people who are working fewer hours than they want to be working.
Carrie Exton (00:38:09):
So between Q4 of 2019 and Q4 of 2020, labour underutilization ranged from 10% to 12% for New Zealand, while the OECD on average ranged from 12% to 18%. So while in New Zealand there was a very slight uptick relative to pre-pandemic, in the OECD on average there was a much sharper increase in labour underutilization in the early months of the pandemic. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:38:43):
So when it comes to the share of people with very low life satisfaction, New Zealand had a particularly good year in 2018, and the situation worsened across 2019, 2020, but the pandemic value, so in 2020, it's not so different to where things were in 2016, and at 6% of the population having very low life satisfaction, that's around half of the OECD average value.
Carrie Exton (00:39:09):
Trust in government on the right here is an unusual one in that it runs counter to the OECD trend for New Zealand, and very unusually, it's counter to the OECD trend in a bad way. So while several OECD governments experienced what we've referred to as a rallying round the flag effect, where trust in government actually improved during the crisis, at least temporarily, in New Zealand trust fell from the high in 2019 of 68%, down to 63%. So this is the share of people who overall say that they have confidence in the national government.
Carrie Exton (00:39:49):
So now again, 2019 looks like it might have been a particularly good year for New Zealand. So maybe some of this is just reversion back to earlier levels. And New Zealand still is much higher than the OECD average on this measure, but I think I'll leave it for those in the room who are much more knowledgeable than I am about this measure and New Zealand to speculate what's going on here.
Carrie Exton (00:40:11):
Again, overall, just to emphasise that on where we do have New Zealand data, typically New Zealand is much better off during the pandemic than most OECD countries. However, just to, I remind that this report covers only the first 12 to 15 or sometimes 18 months of the pandemic. So seeing comments come in, I'll enjoy reviewing those at the end. So where we have New Zealand data, New Zealand's doing better than the OECD on average for most of our indicators, but we are not covering the most recent months of the pandemic. Next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:40:53):
So my last couple of slides, before we open the floor for comment and discussion, focus on chapter one of the report, which provides some thoughts about what it might mean to take a wellbeing lens to the issue of pandemic recovery. So like our wellbeing framework itself, there are probably at least four components to this wellbeing lens, multidimensional, putting people at the centre, putting a focus on inclusion, and also trying to build the resources that sustain wellbeing in the long-term. So not just focusing on outcomes today, but also looking at outcomes tomorrow and thinking about intergenerational equity. So a consistent theme throughout chapter one of the report is a call for more coordinated policy approaches that take into account the wide ranging impacts of the pandemic and how people's lives and their outcomes are all interconnected. So next slide please.
Carrie Exton (00:41:51):
So one thing to emphasise is that the pandemic highlighted how closely interwoven economic, social, relational, and environmental wellbeing outcomes are. To take just one example, this figure shows that during the pandemic, the unemployed and those who were finding difficulty making ends meet were much more likely to feel lonely compared to the population as a whole. So again, this is European data.
Carrie Exton (00:42:20):
This is a really stark reminder of the pervasive impact that economic exclusion has right across people's lives, but it also reminds us that we can't tackle an issue like loneliness without also tackling the life circumstances that cause people to feel lonely and left out of society. Next slide, please.
Carrie Exton (00:42:40):
I think another thing to emphasise is that the pandemic also laid bare the scale of the challenges that countries face in terms of the effort to build back better. So after considerable reductions in economic and social activities, it's estimated that the crisis prompted a roughly 5% fall in total energy related CO2 emissions globally in 2020.
Carrie Exton (00:43:06):
So already by the end of 2020 global energy-related emissions were making of strong recovery. This gives us a flavour of just how resilient carbon emissions prove to be, and the transformational change that is needed to reduce emissions by even 10% globally, let alone getting to net zero. Next slide, please. So what does a wellbeing approach mean for policy and recovery? The report identifies four ways that a wellbeing lens can help support better policy making in the recovery. So this is summarising some of the literature that we've seen on what's the usefulness of a wellbeing approach, but also linking it to some of the OECD work that we've seen, looking at what are the best policy responses to the pandemic?
Carrie Exton (00:44:04):
So the first of our four Rs is refocus. Refocusing on policy actions and the outcomes that matter most and the most urgent priorities. So for example, monitoring impacts right across people's lives and across different population groups, and so looking at inclusion to help target an effective recovery. The second R is redesign. So redesign policies and programmes taking a multidimensional approach. An example here, and we've expanded on this in the next slide is seeking out what we have termed triple win policies that address current wellbeing from multiple perspectives, as well as sustainability, as well as inclusion.
Carrie Exton (00:44:51):
So here, we are really looking to identify some policy pathways that embody your wellbeing approach because they're multi-dimensional and they're looking to improve outcomes, not just today, but over time and for a variety of people, and I would say probably particularly vulnerable groups in society.
Carrie Exton (00:45:09):
The third R that we talk about in the report is realign. So using a wellbeing framework to realign across policy departments and different levels of government. So one example that we talk about in the report that will be very familiar to those in New Zealand is using the budget process to encourage greater collaboration across departments and to apply common assessment framework for spending bids.
Carrie Exton (00:45:35):
The final R is reconnecting people and public and private institutions that support them. So this is really about engaging with communities, with stakeholders to help redesign and to help shape what the future looks like, what type of outcomes we try and seek, but also to co-design the policies that have an impact on people's lives. So, a concrete example here is about using wellbeing frameworks to support dialogue with stakeholders about priorities and how to manage tricky policy trade-offs. Next slide, please. To give some further practical examples on this idea of redesigning policies through a wellbeing lens, this slide just details some of the triple-win policy actions that we discuss in the report. As I said before, the idea here is to design policies that support multiple wellbeing objectives and we want to do that upstream in the policy design process rather than trying to correct for negative externalities after the fact. Again, in this case the triple-win is aiming to improve both current and future wellbeing prospects while also promoting wider access to opportunities.
Carrie Exton (00:46:57):
The policies that we highlight in the report include a focus on green jobs that are inclusive and of high quality, broadening the uptake of lifelong learning, particularly targeting that towards people who need it the most, raising wellbeing for children and young people, reinforcing trust and encouraging meaningful participation in policy making and also strengthening mental and physical health promotion and prevention by using a wellbeing lens. If we can move to the next slide, I'll just cover this last one in a little bit more detail. Just deepening this idea of a wellbeing lens and what it would mean in order to support mental ill-health prevention, good mental health promotion and greater health equity. The OECD has very recently launched a project that will illustrate what a wellbeing approach to mental health could look like. We started this last year with a kickoff conference in December and the final outputs of this work should be available in early 2023. There are three main components to this project. The first is about measurement and the steps that are needed to secure better, more internationally comparable data on population-wide mental health outcomes because where we stand today is that it's very, very hard to compare the mental health outcomes across OECD countries. We have very, very limited comparable data, we've got very little baseline data so we want to use this opportunity to really push forward the collection of mental health data both from a mental ill-health perspective but, as I say, also looking at good mental health, looking at what might be called positive mental health. The second part of this report is all about wellbeing, risk and resilience factors. This is about exploring the interlinkages between mental health and people's economic, social, environmental and relational reality. We're going to use the OECD wellbeing framework to explore the risk and resilience factors that affect people's mental health, but also how mental health shapes these other wellbeing outcomes.
Carrie Exton (00:49:07):
This part of opening up a dialogue about mental health in all policies, which leads to the third component of the work which is all about looking at integrated whole of government strategies for improving mental health through a wellbeing lens. In this context we're very much hoping to speak to the New Zealand Commission for Mental Health and Wellbeing. Next slide, please. If you are interested in following this work and knowing what's coming up next, we will continue to collect data across the various outcomes that I've talked about today through our wellbeing database, which is an incredible repository of over 80 different indicators spliced in a variety of different ways to look at inclusion. We've built up a time series since 2005. Anyone out there who is doing research on wellbeing from an international perspective, really encourage you to look at that database.
Carrie Exton (00:50:07):
We're updating it three times a year on a rolling basis so whenever new data come in, we will try and get those into the database as quickly as we can. We're also doing annual updates of those wellbeing country profiles that I showed earlier so, again, that we can keep monitoring these outcomes as they evolve over time. The report that we produce on a regular basis about wellbeing trends in OECD countries called “How's Life?”, we'll be doing another edition of those around 2024. We're currently having a reflection in the team on the shape and structure of that report. Again, would love to hear thoughts from Treasury knowing your experiences of designing and developing the wellbeing report that you're working on now. We've got some really interesting forthcoming work on social connections, again both to try and really drive the measurement agenda here because it's an area of wellbeing where we're really lacking comparable data across countries.
Carrie Exton (00:51:01):
We know there's a lot of interest, we know the vast majority of stats offices in OECD countries are collecting some data on social connections, but a bit like subjective wellbeing 15 years ago everybody going's in very different directions but there's clear interest in social connection and we really want to drive an improvement in data quality, availability, comparability there. But we also have a planned piece of work looking at how social connections interact with a variety of different government policy domains, so trying to really articulate how and why social connections matter for policy outcomes and also how policy environments shape people's social connectedness. Last thing I'll mention is continuing work within WISE on wellbeing policy practice. Over the coming 12 months or so, we're hoping to establish a platform for knowledge exchange.
Carrie Exton (00:51:59):
The idea here is that OECD countries who are interested in wellbeing approaches will have a place that they can go and talk to one another and the OECD Secretariat will be supporting that work. We're very much hoping that as well as promoting a fruitful exchange among countries, particularly those countries who are very new to all of this. In the last year or so, we've seen both Ireland and Canada, for example, release brand new wellbeing frameworks and in both countries there's a very strong interest in integrating that wellbeing approach across budgeting, across government decision making. There's a really good opportunity for exchange among countries and we want to facilitate that. We're also doing some of our own work to update our wellbeing budgeting case studies. We're hoping to prepare a short paper looking at recent experiences in Italy, Canada and, of course, New Zealand because the last time we looked in any depth at the New Zealand approach, it was actually just before the first Wellbeing Budget in 2019.
Carrie Exton (00:53:04):
There's a lot that we, the OECD Secretariat, need to learn about what you've been doing in New Zealand since then. I mention this here because it's an opportunity to maybe make a connection there. Final slide, please. Thanks very much for staying with me through that quite enormous marathon of data and information. I hope that it's at least registered some interest, and if you'd like to see the report in more detail we've got both the report, which is extremely long, but we've got a very short highlights brochure, some videos of the launch events, some country profiles all online, and a variety of links here for anyone who wants to know a little bit more about the WISE Centre's work. Thanks very much.
Dominick Stephens (00:53:52):
Thank you, thank you very much, Carrie. That was absolutely fantastic. I've got a bit of an echo here. Maybe, it’s… could somebody...
Carrie Exton (00:54:02):
Myself as well.
Dominick Stephens (00:54:04):
Oh, thanks. Yeah. That was absolutely fantastic. Thanks very much. There's lots of data, I imagine, but I think actually you've boiled it down really nicely. That was the strength of your presentation, so for me it was all about the commonalities across different countries and the common trends you noticed. Perhaps for me the thing I really took out of that, it was the commonality of difference so the inner quality of the effect of the pandemic was the way in which it was unequal was similar across countries, so by gender, by ethnicity, by age in particular, so the way it's impacted young people. That was really interesting. I think you did an excellent job of sort of boiling it all down and talking about the commonalities, but I must admit that at each slide I was sort of looking at where New Zealand was compared to others and I thank you for having the bravery to sort of talk to us about New Zealand.
Dominick Stephens (00:55:00):
I'll let you know that I didn't know that our excess death rate had turned positive in 2021 before there was any significant COVID in the country. I sort of need a little bit of ability to understand that, that actually we didn't really have significant COVID in New Zealand until 2022 yet our excess death rate actually went from negative to positive in 2021. I'll be really interested to follow up and learn more about that. I guess we have had some questions through in the chat already, and I'll encourage others continue sending them through. I might just... If I could just ask the first question, I know that the commonalities are really interesting and you did start to talk about differences a little too, but are you planning to do any work on the differences by approach to COVID or experience of COVID?
Dominick Stephens (00:55:51):
Again, in New Zealand I think our experience was radically different to, say, France or the UK in terms of when the disease has struck, how many people were vaccinated when the... How hard the lockdowns were or how... A lot of countries had high restrictions or moderately high restrictions for a long time. We had extreme restrictions for short times and then back to freedom sort of thing. Is there work emerging on how countries have fared by approach on wellbeing metrics rather than just on the economic metrics?
Carrie Exton (00:56:30):
I mean, this speaks to a major challenge in the report which was that we were showing country comparable data collected at the same period of time where countries were experiencing quite vastly different levels of restrictions and disease risk. One of the things that we really strongly emphasised through the report is the exact timeframe in which data were collected. We've got full transparency, every figure has the month of data collection on it and at the front of the report we have a table that gives some key stats on what the basic pandemic experience was at that time. When we were drafting the report, I will say that we had some preliminary analysis ourselves doing some very basic descriptive stuff looking at, for example, the Oxford tracker of restrictions which has been used very widely now in the research literature, and comparing that to pandemic experiences to understand.
Carrie Exton (00:57:34):
But I have to say, none of those analyses made the final cut because none of them were particularly interesting, I'll be honest. I think that speaks to the fact that the policy environment and policy trade-offs that were faced by each country were so nuanced and so timeframe specific that it is very, very hard to do this kind of analysis in a meaningful way. You can do a super crude analysis that says, "Countries that locked down hard on average over 2020 had these wellbeing outcomes." But our sense of the data was a lot of that wasn't hugely meaningful, and we also didn’t think it would particularly fly with our members in terms of a credible explanation for the wellbeing outcomes. The scope of our report is already so vast that we couldn't really get into the detail of what was causing the variation in countries. It's already 400 pages long and that's just the descriptive analysis, so sadly we really couldn't get into the detail.
Carrie Exton (00:58:42):
I have seen OECD colleagues doing a deep analysis of the economic outcomes and the way in which, for example, restrictions impacted economic outcomes. I've not seen the same enthusiasm for doing those analyses with wellbeing data. We'll keep working on it, but I think we're also at this stage... What we wanted to really focus on in the report was lessons to carry forward, and for us that was more about how we can think about the recovery from a wellbeing perspective because that's where countries are now. I think it could well be naive to think that we're not going to have to go for more lockdowns, that we're never going to get further variants, that we're never going to see another pandemic. I do think there are lessons that we need to extract from the pandemic about how we handle pandemics, and we do have a lot of data that is very interesting there. But for this report, we wanted to focus on looking forward because the message we were getting from countries is actually, "Don't look backwards at what we did because we all made mistakes." Actually, what we wanted to do is look forward and to see how can we build wellbeing and build resilience moving forward.
Dominick Stephens (00:59:59):
Brilliant. Actually, I think you more or less answered the last question from Dylan Geoff there which was about the extent to which rather than the policies themselves, how about the effect of how it was communicated when we think about trust in government and things. I'm suspecting that you actually did already answer that, but was there anything else you wanted to add or should I go to a different question?
Carrie Exton (01:00:22):
I think, again, looking at the ways that government communicated with the public is a little beyond the scope of this report so I probably can't add much beyond informed speculation there, so I probably won't elaborate on that one. I think it's a very relevant point and, again, one of the things we do cover in the report is using wellbeing as a way to engage with the population, so both as a way to actually work through trade-offs with the population. The pandemic was a very clear case where governments were constantly dealing with trade-offs and looking at the margin and trying to manage so many different aspects of people's wellbeing and trying to get the balance right across those different impacts. I think wellbeing is a good way of having that conversation in a very democratic, very transparent, very open way, so rather than just sort of making it about health versus the economy, you can actually demonstrate the very powerful links between health and the economy. You can also bring in a conversation about other elements of people's lives that really matter; their social connectedness, their mental health, all of those need to be in the mix. The framework gives you a structure for having those conversations. How that links to public trust, I don't have the data.
Dominick Stephens (01:01:54):
Thanks, Carrie. Just going back to some of the earlier questions, so Connell has picked up on the urban versus non-urban or sort of experienced the difference in experience of the pandemic between country capital regions and other parts of the country and feels that this was reflected in the anti-mandate protest that we had here in March in New Zealand. Connell's question to you is, "Does the OECD report look more closely at the urban versus periphery provincial gap?" And presumably other parts of how the pandemic affected wellbeing.
Carrie Exton (01:02:38):
This report, the one really major feature of inclusion that this report neglects is regional disparities. We have another directorate within the OECD that actually focuses on policy at the regional. This is what we call in OECD terms the subnational level, so whether that's city level or whether that's kind of larger regions. They have been producing some work on COVID-19. Like us, they've really struggled with data and I think their data issues are even more acute than our own, but there is absolutely OECD work published on regional differences and experiences of some wellbeing outcomes during the pandemic, especially economic and a few health indicators. Some of those other wellbeing outcomes are just really time lagged or nonexistent at the regional level. Regional disparities is a major focus for us at the OECD, it is a major part of inclusion and in some of our past work within the WISE Centre we have looked at regional disparities together with our colleagues who work on regional issues. There's some really fruitful collaborations there.
Carrie Exton (01:03:52):
This particular report did not attempt to look at those regional disparities, but I think it's a really interesting one for COVID. We did some OECD countries actually take a differentiated approach to lockdowns across regions. Where I actually live in France, for a while they experimented with having basically a traffic light system across regions to say if your COVID numbers are low, basically you're granted more freedoms than if your COVID numbers are really high. That has been attempted. I'm not... Certainly in France that approach rapidly kind of petered out, and I wonder again if some of that is to do with complexity. If different people in the same country have to monitor several different rules and they're changing every week, I wonder if it just gets a little bit too much in terms of people understanding what's expected of them. That's been the challenge throughout the crisis, is people really having a clear sense of what's expected of them. But yeah, the OECD's got some work here and I can try and dig that out and maybe post it in the chat if I've got the multitasking capability to do that.
Dominick Stephens (01:05:01):
Thanks, Carrie. Yeah. We did have different regions of New Zealand at very different levels of restriction. I was on the wrong side of it, unfortunately, and telecommuting to a region that was much freer than the region that I was in. Yeah. I wondered if some of the effects on social cohesion were different when it was regional than when it was national. Okay. Mark Turner has asked, "Who do you talk to in each country to find out if the country has data available for each OECD wellbeing domain?"
Carrie Exton (01:05:37):
This can be very boring and bureaucratic, but I can tell you exactly who we talk to in terms of within the WISE Centre at the OECD. We have three formal connections to OECD member governments. Our work is supervised by what's called the Committee on Statistics and Statistical Policy, and that's every national statistical office in the OECD receives all of our drafts and we notify them when we do... Well, actually, they tell us if we're allowed to do this work and we then proceed with getting data from them, exchanging with them, they review drafts, they tell us, "Oh, we've got extra data. You should use this." But in addition to the statistical community, WISE is also overseen by the Committee on Employment Labour and Social Affairs. That means that social affairs ministries and health ministries and sometimes employment ministries and sometimes a variety of other ministries within OECD countries also receive all of our drafts.
Carrie Exton (01:06:38):
When we go to this review process, we have explicitly said to countries, "Tell us where you've got data." Within the timeframe, we produced this huge report in a very short space of time. I have to give so much thanks to the team who worked so hard on producing this report. So we did not have time to kind of do a giant questionnaire to all government agencies and all statistical offices, but we basically sourced information through all of our formal contacts, including actually OECD delegations who I'm sure you interact with regularly as well at the Treasury. There's a variety of ways in which we were kind of snowballing our evidence, but it will necessarily be partial and we can't kind of... There's an incredible depth of richness in individual countries that OECD reports simply can't get into, but we did make a big effort to gather up what we could.
Carrie Exton (01:07:43):
The other thing I'll just say is that obviously the OECD has been working on wellbeing data for more 10 years now so we've got a really good dataset. We've got a database I mentioned of over 80 indicators that we maintain on a regular basis. That is always our baseline so that dataset was where we started for this report, so that's already a big resource that we have and that reflects all the data that we know exist currently in OECD countries. But this report then supplements that with some of these innovative studies that we saw coming to the fore during the pandemic, and, again, New Zealand is, I think, highlighted in a couple of boxes as having some really interesting data collections.
Dominick Stephens (01:08:28):
Thanks very much. We have a very specific question, "Is the social connections work leveraging time use data and effect measures to test the validity of social contact questions used in more general household surveys?"
Carrie Exton (01:08:48):
For the pandemic report, I think we had some experimental time use data from the United Kingdom and one or two other countries asked questionnaire questions about time use, but did not run a formal time use survey. Time use surveys are incredibly useful for wellbeing data. There's so much richness there. Sadly, however, most OECD countries run a time use survey at best once every 10 years. For gathering impact of the pandemic over a short period of time, time use was just not an option for us. As I say, apart from, I think the UK Office of National Statistics, which did run a time use survey and one or two other hybrid questionnaires that ask people about time use, but were not formal time use diaries so it didn't have the same methodological rigour. In the rest of our work on wellbeing, we absolutely look at time use data. We use time use data to calculate things like leisure time and personal care. We've used time use data to look at commuting. We have a time use database. We have also started using a measure of time used to look at the time spent socialising. This is a new indicator that we introduced in “How’s Life? 2020” that we'll want to keep rolling forward. There we've got a limited set of countries with two data points, literally over a sort of 30-year period. We've got about six or seven OECD countries that have got two time used surveys. What we saw actually is over that the period of time, the time people spend socialising is actually fallen by 30 minutes on average per week, which doesn't sound like a lot, but the time spent socialising overall, I think is about 12 hours. If you lose 30 minutes about over a 10-year period, that's, that's not a great outcome. Yes, we use time use data. Are we using it to validate questionnaire self-report or social connectedness? I think that would be a great thing to do in our forthcoming social connections work. Thank you for that. I think we'll be, we'll be following that one up.
Dominick Stephens (01:11:00):
Thank you. We've had an observation that New Zealand's had no time use survey for over a decade. We do have two. We've had two done, so we have a time trend available because we have two points, but I agree with Arthur that a new iteration of that would be fantastic. I think I haven't seen any more questions in the chat. I did actually have one more question myself, Carrie, and that's that again, I'm sort of still thinking about these commonalities between countries and some of the commonalities that you really drew out, I mean, the strongest ones seem to be the mental health. That's the one where all countries seem to be, it's trending one way and it's about young people. How do we tell the difference between, perhaps something's very, very common because it was happening anyway for a different reason that is common to all countries. Because again, the experience of the pandemic was really different for at least for some countries than others. Actually, if I see something that's very common between all the countries, I might think to myself, "Well, that could be something that's would've happened pandemic or no." The fact that it's common to all of the countries is maybe more evidence in that direction. How do we tell a difference between something that was going to happen anyway, and something that was the consequence of the pandemic?
Carrie Exton (01:12:29):
Yeah, I mean, the biggest challenge for us writing this report was the lack of baseline data. We wanted to write a report about the impact of the pandemic on people's lives, but you can only talk about impact if you have a pre-pandemic baseline to compare to. Many, many times, we were coming up with shocking statistics suggesting that wellbeing was really suffering, but we couldn't say much comprehensively about what wellbeing looked like before the pandemic to compare that to now. That's not true of many indicators, particularly the ones we've been monitoring very, very frequently for many, many years in the OECD. But some of the most interesting areas like mental health, like loneliness, like other forms of social connectedness, we really do not have the kind of baseline data that we need. Being able to say whether or not this is a pandemic effect versus a trend that was already happening is really difficult if you don't have trend data.
Carrie Exton (01:13:34):
There's no extrapolation to be done because it took a pandemic for people to realise, "Maybe we should measure this stuff." For us, it's very sad because we've been saying for 10-15 years, "Maybe we should measure this stuff." It is very sad that it took a pandemic, but I think for us, the really key thing is not to lose the momentum here. Get everybody analysing and utilising these data as much as possible so that the value of them can be articulated, so that we can actually get some regular data collections here. Mental health in particular, because you mentioned it again, the project that we are doing at the moment on population mental health, including measurement, is all about seeing what we can do to get some decent trend data up and running.
Carrie Exton (01:14:29):
Our mental health statistics at the moment that we have across OECD members cover things like deaths of despair. That's deaths from suicide, acute alcohol abuse and acute substance abuse. Again, we've got some very worrying pre-pandemic trends in a number of OECD countries on that measure. If you look at things like the opioid crisis in the US, that's well pre-pandemic and is linked to a variety of different factors, including economic factors in the US. Yes, I mean, there's on mental health. There's certainly evidence that we should have been worried before the pandemic.
Dominick Stephens (01:15:08):
Thank you. Now, if I've missed anybody's questions, feel free to pop them in at the bottom of the chat. Otherwise, I'm going to continue with my questions. Carrie, when we did our round up of data on how the pandemic had affected wellbeing in New Zealand, we were really surprised by some of what came up and look what we did was gather what we could. It doesn't have the robustness of official statistics, but we gathered the statistics that we could from around other agencies. The one that really surprised me was the assertions, frequent assertions around New Zealand. The school outcomes had gotten worse and that people were leaving school and going off and getting jobs. Actually the Ministry of Education data basically told us the opposite, that's not what had happened and actually school attendance had gone up and there, there really wasn't much of a change in performance.
Dominick Stephens (01:16:19):
The only thing that they did say is we've had, COVID people have actually come down with COVID in early 2022, and then you had a reduction in attendance in more absenteeism at that time, so I was really surprised. Yeah, I was really surprised by that. I sort of still feel that it surely can't be true that in time we're going to study the educational outcomes of these people, who've had their educations disrupted and perhaps the outcomes will be only visible in time, but did you have much objective data on educational attendance or outcomes across the OECD?
Carrie Exton (01:16:58):
There's definitely data in the report about attendance. We look at the average number of weeks per year, that schools were closed in different OECD countries. We actually used that data to also look at the variation in life satisfaction among adults. Some of that data I was showing you on parents with children, we actually did an analysis in the report where we split it to OECD countries that had high levels of school closures versus OECD countries that had low levels of school closures. We really do see the severe impact on life satisfaction among those where school closures were high. All correlation, none of it causation, but consistent with a story that says if you're trying to work from home and homeschool at the same time, that's hard work.
Carrie Exton (01:17:49):
One thing we hugely struggled with in the report is capturing educational outcomes, which is quite different to attendance. At the OECD, we've got a variety of education quality measures through our PISA study. That looks not just at what, it doesn't look at the level of education you attain. It looks at what you know, and can do. So it's very skills based, very competence based. Sadly, we didn't have a PISA running during the pandemic and we will, the last PISA was 2018. We will have one coming up pretty soon. That will be our first objective outcomes focused information about school outcomes. I think the other thing to really emphasise in terms of school closures is just the impact this has had on, on kids' social connectedness and their social development, their emotional development.
Carrie Exton (01:18:49):
There's a certain amount of compensation that schools were really trying to give in terms of academic learning. I don't doubt as well in terms of trying to find ways to, for kids to connect. In some OECD countries, we're looking at a severe disruption of kids, social and emotional development over a period of up to two years and some of the academic outcomes we might be able to hot house through. But I worry about how you replace that social, emotional development at a critical time in somebody's life.
Dominick Stephens (01:19:31):
Yeah. Thanks very much. Another question from Connell. "One might expect measures of effect, e.g. Anxiety, anger, happiness, to be more directly impacted by a pandemic than life satisfaction that implicitly includes satisfaction with prior life events. Do we see effect measures as more sensitive to COVID impacts than life evaluations? And did this suggest any interesting insights?"
Carrie Exton (01:20:01):
You'll see me frantically leafing through the report because we did actually look at affect during the pandemic. One thing I will say, and again, I'm afraid it's a very boring data point, but it matters because our ability to understand this is limited by the data we have. For affect, we are using Gallup World Poll data, which is a thousand people per OECD country collected once a year. One of our big challenges of understanding the Gallup World Poll data during the pandemic was that in different countries, those data are collected at different times of year. For a couple of OECD countries, those data were pre-pandemic for 2020, a few countries they were mid first wave. Some of them were in the lull between the first and second wave for a given country. Overall, we got a very mixed picture in terms of both life satisfaction. I think affect was more a clearer pattern in the sense of higher levels of negative affect.
Carrie Exton (01:21:04):
But even then our ability to interpret those data are really hampered by the fact that they're collected at different times in different countries who were all experiencing very different pandemic outcomes. We're really hoping at some point to dig into the micro data there and pull out some of those differences, but we're also waiting on the 2021 data where we'll have countries, at least all in the pandemic, even if again, experience was very different. By 2021, we were rolling out vaccines, which really changes things. Last thing I'll say on this one is that there's a really... We were pretty puzzled by some of the life satisfaction data that was coming out of the Gallup World Poll. There are some very clear negative impacts in for example, the Latin American countries, where I showed that been very, very high death rates, very, very severe economic impacts, social impacts.
Carrie Exton (01:21:56):
We did see a clear fall in life satisfaction in Latin America. We also, I mentioned in the report, we pull apart these data in a couple of different ways and get some consistent stories in terms of living conditions and people with falling life satisfaction. One of the curious things is actually life satisfaction across ages. Everybody knows that the older generation were more exposed to risk during the pandemic, more at risk of severe outcomes. Often more required to confine themselves, isolate themselves, but actually the people whose life satisfaction suffered the most by far and away was youth. Again, some counterintuitive findings in terms of if older people are being shut in their homes and at higher risk of health outcomes, nevertheless, younger people's life satisfaction was falling harder than older people's. I will also say that, although the Gallup World Poll data on life satisfaction is at times quite, you need to go into it in a lot of depth to make it make sense.
Carrie Exton (01:23:01):
There's a lot of extra work to make it make sense, but the OECD countries that have got subjective wellbeing data that they collected during the pandemic and have a good time series. The picture was much clearer from national statistical office data that the pandemic had a negative impact on subjective wellbeing. One of the interesting things for us is just the contrast between mental health risk of anxiety and depression almost doubling in some OECD countries and life satisfaction really not moving to the same extent. But life satisfaction reflects a variety of aspects of people's lives above and beyond your mental health status. That's a really important thing to say. It's also really important to say that there were two different pandemics, at least two different pandemics in terms of some people were doing relatively okay. Others were really at the forefront of loss and disruption. On balance, that average is out across the population to some quite confusing headline figures, but we really think it's worth digging into those headline figures, because there are some interesting patterns underneath.
Dominick Stephens (01:24:12):
There are lots of really interesting comments coming through from Arthur Grimes who's a New Zealand expert on many things, but I also on life satisfaction in particular, sort of noted that in New Zealand, it basically rose. Life satisfaction rose for all age groups, and I think Arthur earlier said across pretty much all regions with the first lockdown. Arthur also noticed that life satisfaction was better for the first year of the pandemic in New Zealand, but loneliness was worse. I remember the context for New Zealand was a hard lockdown for six weeks and then no COVID and no lockdowns for the rest of the year. A closed border was probably the other feature. Those are all really interesting things. Then Arthur also noted that Auckland, the region that was locked down when the rest of the country wasn't. Had both loneliness and life satisfaction got worse during the time when they were locked down and the rest were not. All really interesting and Arthur also noticed and all ethnicities. Really interesting sort of data on life satisfaction in New Zealand. I mean, wondered if you had any comment to offer or...
Carrie Exton (01:25:29):
Yeah, well I'll just mention, because I'm looking at the Gallup World Poll field work dates and in New Zealand, actually the data were collected in March, 2020. Between mid Feb and mid March 2020. That was well before I think the pandemic had taken hold in a lot of OECD countries. It was just as the pandemic was gripping Europe and I think possibly well before restrictions started in New Zealand. You'll know better than I will, but relative to other OECD countries, that's a very early field work collection date. That might have something to do with the difference. I mean, Chile, Columbia were collected much later in the year, but they also had vastly different outcomes in the pandemic compared to New Zealand. In the first year of our data, New Zealand is really doing so much better than the vast majority of OECD countries. It's not so surprising that we don't see a big fall in life satisfaction, but yeah, the granularity that's available in country in New Zealand is awesome. It was really good to see life satisfaction being embedded in some of the more frequent data collections in New Zealand. I think you got it up to quarterly, which we consider to be best practice and is done in a couple of OECD countries. Again, we'd really encourage the frequent monitoring because that it is only with that frequent monitoring that we'll be able to make sense of any of these trends. If we don't have that data, we can't make sense of it.
Dominick Stephens (01:27:05):
Yeah. We've got lots of interesting sort of discussion and comments coming through on the timing of that. Actually the dates that you've mentioned I thought were when we were in the middle of our first lockdown. But I note that, and I might have that wrong, but I think you've sort of mentioned the first lockdown was when it was novel and people were putting teddy bears and there was sort of an increase in people felt a community and it waned over time would be the experience in New Zealand. People got tired of it. It could have actually been just that early, very first part of the lockdown where people thought it would be a few weeks in life would be back to normal and wasn't this novel. For many people could have affected the results.
Carrie Exton (01:27:50):
I think, especially though New Zealand also locked down before COVID gripped them. Whereas, a lot of European countries experienced a lot of deaths and at least a lot of cases that became deaths before anyone locked down. In that sense, New Zealand got well ahead of the curve with that first lockdown. I think that's made, yeah, the solidarity that we saw in those first weeks is not something that continued necessarily throughout the pandemic, but is maybe something then to do with those data, worth looking at in more detail.
Dominick Stephens (01:28:22):
Yeah. It provides a bit of a natural experiment, I think. You've got at least one country where you had lockdowns without COVID and then you've got a few other countries where you had COVID without lockdowns. There'd be some really interesting fruit for cross sectional regressions there to figure out which was it actually the disease or the lockdowns that were affecting wellbeing in which ways. This has been absolutely fascinating, Carrie. Thank you. I feel really privileged to have been able to sort of have some of the discussion. I've also have really benefited from the... There's been lots of comments coming through as you've been chatting and lots of discussion on the discussion, which is fabulous. Everybody's really interested in what you've had to say. I think you did an amazing job of boiling down an incredibly large data set across so many countries and so many forms of data. Just absolutely, absolutely fantastic. Thanks very much so. Yeah, I'm happy to close things here and just say thank you to Carrie.
[speaking in te reo Māori] Piki te kaha. Piki te Ora. Piki te Wairua. Mauri ora ē
About the presenter
Carrie Exton leads the Wellbeing Data Insights and Policy Practice team in the OECD Centre for Wellbeing, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunity (WISE). The team helps to build the evidence base for WISE policymaking, including the development of frameworks and indicators, and their roles in supporting government decisions. Carrie is the overall editor for the How's Life? series of reports, which provide an in-depth assessment of WISE indicators across OECD and partner countries. Her team's current research projects include the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on wellbeing; interlinkages between mental health and wellbeing; social connections data and its role in policymaking; and wellbeing and sustainability in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Previously based in the OECD Statistics and Data Directorate, Carrie has more than a decade of experience in developing and analysing measures of wellbeing. Prior to joining the OECD, Carrie worked as a policy advisor in the UK Civil Service, including roles in strategy, private office, higher education, research and science policy, and the Apprenticeships Unit. She holds a DPhil (PhD) in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University.
Wellbeing Report seminar series
At Te Tai Ōhanga – The Treasury, we are developing the first Wellbeing Report - Te Tai Waiora that will be published in November 2022.
This online seminar is part of a Wellbeing Report programme of Guest lectures running in 2022 and 2023.