Discussion: Improvements and development needs

As mentioned in the introduction to this report and echoing Socialstyrelsen’s (Sweden) justification for following up on the development of welfare technology, statistical indicators are cornerstones for understanding the current state of particular issue and for informing action plans, strategies, and initiatives.

This report has answered, to this point, two of the three research question that have guided our study. The first of these research questions was:

In answering this question, this report has explored the availability of current statistical indicators in the areas of active and healthy ageing, welfare technology, and age-friendly cities and communities. We have shown institutions, databases, and indicators that must help policymakers to make informed decisions. The institutions we have identified comprise organisations of different nature such as statistical institutes, public authorities, or research-oriented organisations. Because of this, the knowledge they produce is aimed at solving different, but still related, issues and this translates into a broad spectrum of indicators (see, for instance, Table 5 in the Appendix). As such, this poses advantages and challenges for policymakers who rely on the knowledge produced by these organisations. An advantage, for example, is that having a diverse and broad set of indicators provides a larger picture of the current situation. As we have seen, thanks to having multiple sources it is possible to cover all the domains of active and healthy ageing (regardless of how these concepts are defined) to some degree. Another advantage is that having transnational indicators allows comparisons between countries, and even between regions within these countries. This is a matter of utmost importance if the Nordic countries are to have a common strategy for active and healthy ageing.

Nonetheless, there are at least three challenges that need to be addressed to obtain a clearer picture and also to have sharper tools for conducting analyses. First, the examples of the indicators produced by the OECD, the ESS, Eurostat, and the UNECE show that country and time coverage is not always guaranteed. The clearest examples of this are the data from Eurostat and the UNECE, which often do not cover Iceland and Norway because they are not part of the European Union. However, it is not only these institutions that present this challenge. As it has been pointed out in this report, not all Nordic countries have participated in all editions of the ESS, for instance. This might be due to country choice to not participate in the survey. The lack of country and time coverage for these data pose a great challenge to studying the progression of countries over time and for making comparisons between countries.

A second challenge identified in this report is the obsolescence of data, especially the data provided by Nordic databases such as NHWStat and the NSD. As shown before, the few relevant indicators offered by these databases reach, at most, the year 2019 at the time of writing. In addition, there are also time gaps that hinder a temporal analysis of these indicators. However, this is not a challenge posed only by Nordic databases and many other indicators produced by other institutions are also outdated, as is the case for many datasets from the OECD and Eurostat.

Finally, the third challenge identified in this study refers to the coverage of subnational territories (regions and/or municipalities). It is very seldom that supranational institutions produce indicators that are relevant for active and healthy ageing at the subnational level, with Eurostat being an exception. This represents a barrier for comparability across regions in different countries because this means that national institutions have the responsibility to produce these indicators and, as such, these indicators turn out to be different in each country.

A second aim of this study was to investigate how these indicators are used in policymaking in some Nordic municipalities. The second research question of this study was:

The findings from the roundtable and the interviews with representatives of municipalities resonate very much with the findings from the collection of indicators. The municipalities interviewed for this study expressed the lack of usability of most indicators (at supranational, national, and even municipal levels) for the mandates they have in promoting active and healthy ageing, welfare technology, and age-friendly cities. This is also reflected in the policies and strategies that these municipalities have implemented in those areas. The reason why municipalities do not use statistical indicators, based on our analysis, is the lack of territorial coverage but also the lack of indicators that can reflect the needs encountered at the local level. As some representatives mentioned, it is often the municipalities themselves that produce their own statistical indicators for internal use. However, this effort is costly, and it becomes a barrier for those municipalities without the necessary resources to carry it out. In addition, it entails the creation of different indicators in each municipality, which makes the comparability of such indicators more difficult across municipalities.

On the other hand, one advantage of the existing indicators is that they can serve as a benchmark or reference for policymakers at all levels. For example, the work done by the Global Network for Age-friendly Cities and Communities or the UNECE sets the framework and goals upon which countries, regions, and municipalities can base their work.

Beyond comparing Nordic countries, regions, and municipalities, our interest is to assess what can be done from the current point of departure. Therefore, our third research question was:

We have shown the results of our desk research and the roundtable discussions, and we have attempted to establish a dialogue between the outcomes of these two exercises with the aim to acquire different perspectives on the issue. As we have seen, the existing indicators can shed some light on the matter at stake, but they fall short of being a reliable tool for policymaking, particularly at the local and regional levels. Territorial and time coverage, time obsolescence, and local detail have emerged as the main challenges for the use of indicators by policymakers. Therefore, it becomes clear that improvements are needed for these guidelines to be more supportive of policymaking. However, some of these improvements are out of reach for Nordic policymakers as these challenges refer, at least partially, to supranational institutions. Despite this, there is still room for improvement at the Nordic level by harmonising efforts and producing common indicators. To better outline the needs for improvement, the following section offers some recommendations based on the findings of this study.