Foreword

Measuring regional well-being is an important tool for local and regional governments to address the needs of citizens and identify the policy domains that can have the highest impact on people’s lives. This publication is part of the OECD’s How’s Life in Your Region series, which seeks to measure well-being at regional and local levels. The series was launched in 2014 as part of the OECD Better Life Initiative with the OECD report How’s Life in Your Region? (2014). Since then, the OECD has made available a set of well-being indicators for more than 400 regions across 11 dimensions of life. This has also provided a framework to understand the role of regions and cities in the national well-being agendas. Examples include the two reports “Measuring well-being in Mexican states” (2015) and “Well-being in Danish cities” (2016).

This report is the result of a two-year policy dialogue with 50+ stakeholders of the province of Córdoba (Argentina), as part of the regional government’s commitment to placing people and the communities they live in at the centre of public policy, using reliable data to improve decision making and enhance citizens’ trust in government. This dialogue is a direct follow-up to the OECD Territorial Review of Córdoba, Argentina (2016), which recommended, in particular, developing a multidimensional well-being framework to account for where people live and work to better guide regional development policies.

This report applies the OECD Regional Well-Being Framework to the province of Córdoba, Argentina, to analyse its performance against other regions in OECD countries, and, on that basis, provide policy recommendations to improve regional development policies. The report builds on a household survey (2018 Well-being Survey) carried out across the four main urban agglomerations of the province, namely Gran Córdoba, Río Cuarto-Las Higueras, Villa María-Villa Nueva and San Francisco, which together account for 55% of the province’s population. This survey, co-designed with the OECD, was instrumental to collect new data for 30 objective and subjective indicators across 12 well-being dimensions.

The data and policy analysis presented in this report are important milestones of the work the OECD is carrying out to assist governments in implementing policies that raise the well-being of citizens.

Foreword