Twenty years ago the publication of Toward a Social Report by the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare was hailed as a major forward step in developing indicators of conditions in society into a national system of social accounting of relevance to public policy. The resulting social indicators movement quickly mobilized able social scientists to produce a variety of indicators monitoring trends in their society, and internationally. National governments too began to sponsor new types of social reports. The years since have seen an apparent decline in the momentum of the social indicators movement. Hence, to evaluate developments, the Journal of Public Policy invited a number of distinguished pioneers in the movement in Europe and America to give their individual assessment of what has happened to social indicators.

The Social Indicators Movement which emerged in the late 1960s was motivated by a broad and appealing idea. It is important to monitor changes over time in a wide range of quality of life, both for a population as a whole and for its significant subgroups, because such information, when combined with other data, can generate new knowledge about how to increase quality of life through more effective social policies.

Social indicators have not fulfilled their promise, or at least have not lived up to the expectations held of them in the late 1950s and 1960s. Despite the continued growth of social statistics, produced both by governments and other organisations, the aim of producing precise, concise and evaluatively neutral measures of the state of society and of change in society has apparently eluded some of the best minds of the social science and governmental statistics communities. Whereas a wide range of economic indicators and data are readily available, if not without their problems (cf. Johnson, 1988), and integrated into the concepts of economic theory, standard measures of crime, health, well-being, education and many other social characteristics have proven much more difficult to construct and establish as standard yardsticks of social conditions. This note considers some of the reasons for these difficulties. It relates specifically to the aspiration to construct social indicators, not to social statistics more generally (as reviewed in, for example, Carley, 1981).

We're told a story of how American Indians taught their young to swim: They tied a rope around the youngster and tossed him in the water. Social indicators were tossed into the water without the rope! Without the rope of adequate Federal or private funds for support, social indicators were forced to learn to swim. And swim, they did.

The social indicators movement sought to establish a system of social accounting that was broader than the money-based national income accounts. Specialized studies of social trends in housing, health, crime, and so forth could be successful in illuminating a specific area of social life, but together they became obstacles to the achievement of the ideal of an integrated set of social accounts. Even if crime and housing have a relationship the statistics generated within each domain are together incommensurable.

Social indicators research developed in the United States at the end of the 1960s and the principal ideas and approaches were received by West German social scientists soon thereafter. It became common usage to speak of a social indicators movement, an expression which is rather unusual in regard to a scientific approach.

The social indicators movement has been a disappointment to its originators. By the late 1970s, at least in the US, the great hopes for social indicators to become a major influence on public policy had been tempered. The outpouring of literature using the term ‘social indicators’ dwindled. Policy scientists turned their attention to other topics or found new labels for their interests. The Social Science Research Council closed its Social Indicators Research Center in Washington, DC and stopped publishing its newsletter. And in the US no annual social report seemed likely to be institutionalized. Many observers decided the social indicators movement was a failure.

In retrospect, I think that the fate that befell the social indicators ‘movement's rich array of economic statistics and related measures were simply inadequate indicators of emerging developments and issues under prevailing conditions of rapid social change and severe social strains. The felt need was for more adequate monitoring and reporting of social conditions and processes – implying a need to develop improved measures of these phenomena, together with expanded data collection capabilities. Thus the dual goals of the social indicators movement were apparent from the start: to establish an improved social reporting capability as soon as possible, and to encourage longer-term research and development in the general area of social, measurement and model-building. It may be helpful, therefore, to consider the outcome of these two efforts separately.

The social indicator movement has always faced in two directions—toward academic disciplines that provide quality control and estimate causal relations, and toward the political system that chooses and uses indicator statistics. At worst, the movement has risked appearing to be peripheral to both theoretical social science and policy choice; such perceptions may have contributed to the movement's weakening. The use of noneconomic time series of data to guide the definition of public problems, however, did not and will not die away.

More than 25 years have now passed since the idea of a regular social reporting about the effects of political programmes was first introduced, i.e. a System of Social Accounts (SSA) that was to supplement the System of National Accounts (SNA). The SNA could not provide answers to vital social questions pertaining to those parts of our living conditions that could not be evaluated in economic terms and consequently were not covered by the System of National Accounts, nor to questions of how welfare and living conditions differed in various population groups.

Social Indicators provide data for assessing the social issues and concerns for human welfare inherent in the concept of sustainable development, particularly in the context of economic structural adjustment. They give a broader social view of development.1 The World Bank is now the only institution that regularly publishes, on an annual basis, detailed data on social conditions for all countries of the World. This information is contained in the Bank's Social Indicators of Development Report (SID), the latest edition of which came out in December 1989.2 The data published form a subset of a much broader array of social statistics of varying reliability held on file in the Bank's central data base. Since the Bank is organized according to geographical regions for operational purposes, and implements policy country by country, the data are arranged primarily on a national basis. Statistical series published by the Bank, therefore, mostly reflect country specific definitions and classifications. This has both advantages and disadvantages, but it means that in some cases international comparability may be sacrificed for national relevance. The Social Indicators Report, however, also contains several World Tables on special topics where certain selected indicators, judged to be more comparable and critical than others, are shown for all countries.

The Pressman–Wildavsky model of implementation finds a paradox in the success of any federal programs, based on their low probability of approval. Bowen relaxed this model's independence assumption to improve implementation. Here the model is reexamined: a. its sensitivity is tested; b. the empirical base for the probability range is reviewed; and c. its fit with implementation processes in general is checked. The conclusions are (1) the model's ‘proof’ depends on its assumptions and computations, (2) there is no empirical basis for the probability estimates, and (3) the model only fits one special case of implementation processes. Better models can be developed, and successful implementation may require organizational interdependencies.

Concerns about reforming public pensions schemes are an OECD-wide phenomenon. This paper highlights in a first part the background and various causes of the reform debate, summarized in five broad areas: budgetary, economic, social, population aging, and system maturation. The second part presents major directions of current reform approaches of public pension schemes. Despite the different structure and history of these schemes, the major trends in reform are strikingly similar. The final part discusses some major policy considerations resulting from the current reform approach in the face of an aging population. At present, the pace of the reform process in most countries must be considered insufficient to put the pension systems on a financially sound basis and thus to avoid future individual welfare losses and intergenerational income distribution.

Between 1960 and 1981 there was a very substantial increase in female enrolment and a move towards a much lessened degree of gender inequality in tertiary education in most advanced industrial societies. The article seeks to locate the main determinants of cross-national variance in gender inequality at both time points and of change across time. The hypotheses examined suggest the influence of a variety of economic, social structural, political, demographic and attitudinal variables and a multivariate analysis demonstrates that all are implicated in the transformation of educational policy outcomes during the period.