Businesses have a significant impact on people's economic and social conditions, as well as on environmental outcomes. This paper presents an overview of the various kinds of initiatives aimed at measuring or reporting on business' impact, or certain aspects of it. It shows that despite the proliferation of information and frameworks to measure these impacts, there is currently no common understanding and practice on how to assess the performance of businesses in different social and environmental areas. Building on the OECD's work on measuring well-being at the national level, the paper aims at better understanding how businesses can impact people's well-being and sustainability. It contributes to, and complements, other initiatives undertaken by the OECD on responsible business conduct and inclusive growth. This analysis is a first attempt at extending to businesses the approach used by the Organisation to assess and benchmark the well-being performance of countries and sub-national regions, in view of creating a common language and improving the quality, comparability, and coherence of information on the impact of businesses on societal progress and people's life.

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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call to achieve peace and prosperity for all by 2030, leaving no one behind. This paper summarises available evidence to measure the distance that OECD countries need to travel in order to reach SDG targets related to women and girls. It finds that 102 of the 247 indicators in the UN Global Indicator Framework are gender-related. However, in practice, data for OECD countries are available for only 35 indicators, distributed across 9 of the 17 goals. Based on available data, OECD countries are on average closest to meeting targets for women on Health (Goal 3), mortality from homicides and occupational injuries (Goals 16 and 8). Conversely, they are further away from targets in three areas: personal safety (Goal 16), equal representation (Goals 9 and 5) and healthy lifestyles (Goals 2 and 3). Where data is available for both men and women, the evidence shows that women are closer to SDG targets than men on all indicators related to Health (Goal 3), but are further away from targets in many employment-related targets (Goals 8 and 9) as well as on feeling safe (Goal 16) and ICT skills (Goal 4). No data are available for the planet goals (Goals 6, 12, 13, 14 and 15), for which few indicators are identified as gender-related.

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