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Income, Employment, and Material Well-Being

Difficulty making ends meet

It belongs to Income, Employment, and Material Well-Being, the part of the welfare catalog concerned with household resources, labour-market inclusion, and the material constraints that shape daily choices. The exact stored unit is Percentage of population aged 16 years or over, the geographic presentation is global…

current value18.4Percentage of population aged 16 years or over
Worse than normalImproving(−0.12)
GlobalAbove normal = worseimportance: 0.80unit: Percentage of population aged 16 years or over1 active driverUpdated Dec 2025

How to read it

Readings above the normal line are worse than normal, so they plot downward here; readings below it are better.

Indicator & its drivers over time

About this indicator

It belongs to Income, Employment, and Material Well-Being, the part of the welfare catalog concerned with household resources, labour-market inclusion, and the material constraints that shape daily choices. The exact stored unit is Percentage of population aged 16 years or over, the geographic presentation is global, the data publisher is Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the immutable numerical identity is OECD.WISE.WDP,DSDHSL@DFHSLCWB,1.1#15#AGE=T|DOMAIN=HSL1|EDUCATIONLEV=T|SEX=T|UNITMEASURE=PTPOPY_GE16#identity. Candidate 10 is broader or differently denominated than “Difficulty making ends meet” in Percentage of population aged 16 years or over. Factrail stores this narrower source-defined measure, preserves the input wording in reconciliation, and makes no claim that the values measure the broader phrase. For catalog item 10, the provider definition is: Difficulty making ends meet in the OECD Current Well-being dataflow, selected with AGE=T|DOMAIN=HSL1|EDUCATIONLEV=T|SEX=T|UNITMEASURE=PTPOPY_GE16. The dataset supplies country observations and status flags under one common SDMX structure; the displayed global comparison is an explicitly disclosed unweighted mean, not an OECD-published world total. That definition controls the denominator, population, reporting instrument, and statistical meaning. This Indicator records an observed outcome; it does not assert why that outcome changed. Welfare assessment for item 10 uses lowerisbetter. Lower observations are treated as better welfare relative to the dated comparative reference. The direction applies to the stored official measure after the disclosed transformation, if any, rather than being inferred from an emotionally positive or negative title. No mathematical transformation is applied before persistence. Keeping title, series identity, unit, scope, transformation, and interpretation together prevents the record from mixing incompatible measurement concepts. The numerical observations for catalog item 10 were retrieved from OECD Well-being Data Monitor — Current Well-being through https://sdmx.oecd.org/public/rest/v1/data/OECD.WISE.WDP,DSDHSL@DFHSLCWB,1.1/?startPeriod=2018&endPeriod=2025 (opens in a new tab). The provider landing page is https://sdmx.oecd.org/public/rest/v1/data/OECD.WISE.WDP,DSDHSL@DFHSLCWB,1.1/?startPeriod=2018&endPeriod=2025 (opens in a new tab). The research package records the access date, exact dataset and series identifiers, dimension key AGE=T|DOMAIN=HSL1|EDUCATIONLEV=T|SEX=T|UNITMEASURE=PTPOPY_GE16, unit, provider metadata, transformation, and yearly aggregation label. The bounded Source and Evidence records can therefore reproduce which numbers were used without treating a generic homepage as row-level proof. Measurement provenance for item 10 follows this provider method: The OECD dataset is country-based, so each displayed year is an unweighted mean of the economies reporting the exact same measure, unit, and dimension key. This aggregation supports a transparent global comparison but is not described as an OECD-published world total. 2018 combines 32 reporting economies; 2019 combines 28 reporting economies; 2020 combines 29 reporting economies; 2021 combines 31 reporting economies; 2022 combines 28 reporting economies; 2023 combines 28 reporting economies; 2024 combines 28 reporting economies; 2025 combines 27 reporting economies. The output keeps full numerical precision through NormalLine, deviation, and interpretation calculations. Display clients may round for readability, but the persisted value is not squeezed into a zero-to-one score and is not rounded before calculation. The item 10 NormalLine starts on 2018-01-01 at 10.05 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over. 25th percentile of provider-published reporting-economy observations in the selected series and dimensions. The calculation keeps the source unit, dimensions, and transformation fixed and is a comparative reference rather than an invented statutory target. For zeroisnorm, the value is exactly zero and is never relaxed because non-zero observations are common. For every item 10 point, normallinevalue copies that dated line and deviationfromnormal is stored in raw-unit terms as observation minus NormalLine. Arithmetic sign and welfare sign are separate. A positive raw deviation is adverse for lowerisbetter, favourable for higherisbetter, and adverse above zero for zeroisnorm. The custom governance score retains its provider scale and uses the public methodology explanation rather than title sentiment. The complete retained sequence is 2018: 21.546875 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over; 2019: 20.0928571429 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over; 2020: 19.2448275862 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over; 2021: 18.7967741935 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over; 2022: 18.9642857143 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over; 2023: 19.0285714286 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over; 2024: 18.5178571429 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over; 2025: 18.4 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over. The first observation is 21.546875 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over in 2018 and the latest is 18.4 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over in 2025. The absolute change is -3.146875 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over, equivalent to -14.6047860769% of the absolute starting level. The minimum observed value is 18.4 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over, and the maximum is 21.546875 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over. For catalog item 10, the latest observation differs from the NormalLine by 8.35 Percentage of population aged 16 years or over and is classified as negative under lowerisbetter. That classification is a deterministic comparison, not a causal explanation or editorial verdict. A movement may reflect real change, altered reporting coverage, revised estimates, a changed survey frame, or several of those at once. There are 8 retained item 10 observations in the selected 2018-2025 research window. The retained observations satisfy the minimum temporal rule without interpolation, extrapolation, or forward filling. Missing years are absent observations, not zeroes. The sequence is intentionally irregular when the official source is irregular, because a smooth-looking line created by invented values would be methodologically false. The displayed global item 10 sequence has one consistent numerical identity: OECD.WISE.WDP,DSDHSL@DFHSLCWB,1.1#15#AGE=T|DOMAIN=HSL1|EDUCATIONLEV=T|SEX=T|UNITMEASURE=PTPOPY_GE16#identity. No second source series is spliced into a gap, no latest value is copied into a missing year, and no country-only observation is relabelled as a World value. If the source later adds or revises an observation, the update must arrive as a new reviewed research package with its own checksum and audit record. A defensible graph edge requires an existing Driver, direction, strength, lag, confidence, and Source/Evidence that supports the mechanism. The outcome series alone cannot establish that causal chain. For item 10, importance weight 0.8 is generated by indicator-importance-rubric-v1. Its five committed components are directness 0.85, population reach 0.7, persistence 0.8, effect on human capabilities 0.8, and overlap control 0.85. The formula weights them 0.35, 0.25, 0.20, 0.15, and 0.05, then rounds to the nearest 0.05. The value is deterministic and reproducible; it is not an intuitive score assigned while drafting prose. Candidate 10 is broader or differently denominated than “Difficulty making ends meet” in Percentage of population aged 16 years or over. Factrail stores this narrower source-defined measure, preserves the input wording in reconciliation, and makes no claim that the values measure the broader phrase. The correction preserves all 120 catalog candidates as auditable inputs while refusing to fabricate a literal series that the selected official systems do not publish coherently. The resulting canonical Indicator may be narrower, differently denominated, or differently scoped than the preliminary phrase, and that difference is part of the record rather than hidden in a footnote. The 2018-2025 sequence for item 10 is too short for strong causal or structural claims. Cross-economy comparability can be affected by institutional definitions, survey coverage, modelled estimates, missing observations, classification practices, revisions, and unequal statistical capacity. A global aggregate or unweighted reporting-economy mean can also conceal distributional extremes and should not be used as an individual-level estimate. The item 10 NormalLine is a transparent comparative reference, not a claim that every jurisdiction has the same legal target or feasible frontier. The source may revise both historical points and metadata. Any later refresh must preserve the earlier Source, Evidence, checksum, and audit trail; it must not mutate the meaning of an already reviewed series identity.

Causal network

This indicator’s slice of Factrail’s verified causal web — the people, facts, drivers and welfare indicators it connects to. Select any node to trace a path.

By the Factrail desk · Method: how we source and score · Last reviewed