the social structure of oecd-countries 1960-1980 and its implications for selected aspects of wellbeing

preface: this report was requested by oecd as a preparatory contribution to the planned publication "the oecd social indicators". it should help to demonstrate on an empirical basis whether an international presentation of social indicators could make sense in view of the structural and historical differences between countries and the differences in measurement of wellbeing persisting in spite of common efforts at international standardization continuing through several years. special attentionshould be given to the possibilities of presenting and analyzing disaggregated data on an international level, since this was one of the aspects in which the oecd social indicator programme attempted at an innovation in the field of comparative social statistics. for several years the author was austrian delegate to the subcommittee "inequality indicators". she was also engaged as a consultant for helping to design the international questionnaire by which part of the data that will enter the indicator report were requested from the member countries as well as for checking the national data bases of several countries and helping francoise core-cayet (oecd) in designing the international tables on which this report will be based. this contribution was supposed to draw specifically on the data collected in the framework of the social indicator programme (quoted as "social indicator reference tables" resp. "social indicator tables") as well as on previous oecd publications "oecd demographic trends 1950-1990", paris 1979 , and ("oecd labor force statistics 1969-1980", paris 1982). deviations from other international or national sources were to be disregarded.;