Society at a Glance 2024: OECD Social Indicators, is the tenth edition of the OECD overview of social indicators. The report addresses the growing demand for quantitative evidence on social well-being and its trends. This year’s edition presents 25 social indicators, and includes data for 38 OECD member countries and, where available, accession and key partner countries, i.e. Bulgaria, Brazil, Croatia, China, India, Indonesia, Peru, Romania and South Africa, and other G20 countries Argentina and Saudi Arabia.
This report features a special policy chapter on fertility. It discusses the long-term decline in the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) observed in many OECD countries. The personal choice to have children depends on a wide range of factors, such as costs of raising children, the happiness they bring, economic and financial security, social norms, personal and medical conditions, as well as the overall labour market situation and family policy environment. The chapter presents and discusses evidence from recent OECD analysis of the effect of labour market outcomes, housing costs and different aspects of the family policy framework (e.g. parental leave, Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), financial supports) on fertility rates. The chapter also brings in evidence from the international literature on the drivers of fertility rates and concludes with a discussion of policy implications.
The rest of the report compares a wide range of social outcomes across countries. Chapter 2 provides a guide to help readers understand the structure of OECD social indicators. Chapter 3 is based on the 2022 OECD Risks that Matter Survey on people’s perceptions of social and economic risks and the extent to which they think governments address those risks. As in previous editions, Society at a Glance presents 25 social indicators, 5 each in Chapters 4 to 8, on General context, Self-sufficiency, Equity, Health, and Social cohesion.
This report was prepared by Willem Adema (project leader and Chapter 1) and Maxime Ladaique, with contributions from Laurenz Baertsch, Júlia Cots-Capell, Jonas Fluchtmann, Pablo Minondo Canto and Alicia Takeuchi from the OECD Social Policy Division. We much appreciated the comments by colleagues from the OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (ELS) and the OECD WISE Centre on earlier drafts. We are grateful to delegates to the Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Committee and the Working Party on Social Policy who commented on the draft in April 2024. Under the leadership of Stefano Scarpetta (Director, ELS), and Mark Pearson (Deputy Director, ELS), Monika Queisser (Senior Counsellor and Head of the Social Policy Division, ELS) supervised the project.