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This brief reviews past applications in this field as well as work currently underway in this area and makes proposals for applications of these methodologies in the evaluation of major social programs.

This study undertakes an examination of social indicator applications in the widest sense. The methodologies examined included standard (level) of living measures, quality of life measures, social statistics/living condition measures, social indicator systems, social accounting matrices, satellite systems, and composite indicators.

The EDD paper reviews current work in this area, among these and most notably:

• The Treasury Board-led federal government-wide performance indicator project of 1997, and federal government activities in the composite indicator field, including Canadian (Statistics Canada) versions of the US Fordham Indicator of Social Health and the US Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), and its work on Life Paths analysis, the Health-Adjusted Life Expectancy Model.
• Recent provincial efforts, with a special focus on the Alberta accountability framework (the most advanced example of such provincial work), and the Quality of Community Life System, an initiative of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.
• Social indicator work by non-government agencies, in particular by the Canadian Council on Social Development (Economic Security Index for Children), and others.

This paper makes the following recommendations for work of this kind in support of program evaluation, which are similar to those in a companion paper by Ekos.

• HRDC should consider developing provincial composite indicators of the GPI or Human Development Index (HDI) variety, to track provincial socio-economic trends, including the effects of HRDC spending on the Canadian Health & Social Transfer (CHST), and those of similar or complementary provincial programs, as contextual evidence for the evaluation and monitoring of CHST. This work should be undertaken perhaps jointly with Health Canada to cover the CHST health component, since some key health determinants lie outside the health area (employment and income adequacy, and education, which are of policy interest to HRDC). Partial indices which focus on trends in socio-economic variables directly linked to the characteristics of the beneficiaries affected by CHST social spending, — social welfare, post secondary education (PSE) and perhaps also health — should also be developed.
• HRDC should explore the possibility of collaborating with Statistics Canada and Health Canada to develop provincial Input-Output (I-O) tables with social accounting dimensions for one year, for the purposes of obtaining the attributions effects from provincial spending by the federal government on CHST component activities.
• HRDC should consider undertaking a recurring panel survey of HRDC-CHST funding beneficiaries (provincial welfare recipients and PSE students). This might provide the basis for econometric analysis of causal hypotheses related to the relative importance of CHST, and similar provincial spending, as compared to other potential causal factors determining trends in socio-economic well-being.
• Selected “most affected” community and household case studies should be carried out to provide contextual information regarding the impacts and effects of provincial welfare assistance and PSE spending, financed in part by CHST (and perhaps also for the CHST health component, and perhaps jointly with Health Canada and the provinces).

Since the completion of this report, the government-wide performance indicator project has been transferred to the federal Policy Research Committee to determine its policy research implications.