TNAG-0531-FCO40-626-Application-of-International-Labour-Convention-to-Hong-Kong-1975 — Page 149

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All the techniques of social planning which have been developed so far suffer from one basic weakness which lies in the still unsolved problem of the quantification of social objectives. In economic planning, inputs or costs of a project are measured in units of money and there is no problem in comparing outputs of such projects since they can also be expressed in the same units of measurement. When planning, however, for the introduction of school meals, for unemployment benefits Or for the construction of old people's homes, the cost can clearly be estimated in terms of money units, but the output side of which measure, which comes under the general heading "improvement of living conditions of the population",

cannot.

How can we put a price, i.e. express in terms of money, the utility of school meals, unemployment benefits, or old people's homes, to society? It seems obvious that this cannot be done unless we are trying to estimate the value of this investment in the human factor of production; for this reason economic planning of the past considered social expenditure only as a one-way transfer without economic counterpart. But if it is admitted that all economic activity is only a means towards achieving a social goal, i.e. the above-mentioned improvement in living conditions of the population, there seems to be no point in trying to measure the degree of achievement of this objective in money units. Nevertheless, in order to determine whether some progress has been made towards achieving social objectives, scme method of measurement will have to be invented. At present, we do not yet know how to measure the impact of school meals on the health of children and their school performance, the influence of an unemployment insurance system on the working morale of wage earners, the effects of old people's homes on the life of families which otherwise would have to bear the burden of looking after their old members. dces not mean, however, that such measurements are impossible.

This

The imperative need for discovering some measures of social progress appeared in the Western societies in the course of the last decade, when it became clear that economic progress is not automatically followed by social progress and that, on the contrary, a deterioration of social conditions may take place. It was mainly the paradox of growing social discontent at a time of increasing economic prosperity which led to the formation in the United States of what is sometimes called a "social indicators movement". The idea was to develop appropriate series of social statistics which would make it possible to measure social progress and, at the same time, to be of use in defining social objectives. It was further suggested that if a method can be found whereby to measure social progress, it should also be possible to evaluate the impact of different public programmes on social conditions and introduce meaningful social planning.

It should be added that the idea of devising a series of social indicators emerged at a time when the PPBS method had already made a major contribution to the understanding of social administration by introducing the already mentioned functional analysis of its operations, i.e. by examining public expenditures not only according to the institutional structure but also by grouping them across the institutional barriers. As we have pointed out, this method ran into difficulties when the question had to be asked as to the social objectives served by different activities of social administration. At this point the systems analysis approach came in with the idea that social progress can only be measured if society is considered as a system with a definite set of social values on which a general consensus of opinion can be reached and which should guide the development of all sectors ΟΙ subsystems of society. This requirement became, in turn, a major stumbling block in the way of developing this ambitious concept and it is nct therefore surprising that, when the social indicators movement reached Europe, this principle was promptly abandoned.

The orientation of most recent research on social indicators' is nov towards the development of sectoral indicators which are more manageable since more precise knowledge of social reality can be gained at this level and, it is hoped, could lead in the long run to the elaboration of a model of the global societal system. Some recent methodological studies indicate that the way towards overcoming the problem of quantification of social objectives consists of defining the qualitative variable, i.e. the phenomenon that cannot be measured through its association with several quantitative variables, i.e. phenomena that can be measured.

1 Cf. V. Rys: "Social Indicators and Their Application to Social Security" in International Social Security Review, Nos. 1-2, 1973.

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