“End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity”
Last week’s United Nations General Assembly, held in New York City, generated no shortage of headlines. But one notable policy initiative from the world body was not discussed by world leaders when it should have been. UN secretary-general António Guterres has put together a high-level group of specialists to propose new indicators for human and planetary prosperity that go ‘Beyond GDP’.
The intention is to accelerate progress towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and researchers are being invited to contribute. When the working group publishes its recommendations next year, its advice could have far-reaching consequences. That is why we are urging researchers the world over to engage.
Guterres’ project is called Beyond GDP because of the necessity of getting past the world’s go-to indicator of economic progress: gross domestic product (GDP). It is the sum of what consumers spend, what governments and businesses spend and invest as well as the net value of exports and imports. Over its 70-year lifespan, GDP growth has become the benchmark for national economic competence. Every country’s leader and their finance teams do what they can to ensure that GDP data only ever point upwards.
And yet, for decades, researchers have been pointing out that this approach creates perverse incentives and could be creating as many problems as it solves — particularly when growth in GDP undermines other aspirations encapsulated in the SDGs. GDP fetishism, as economist Joseph Stiglitz, of Columbia University in New York City, calls it, is one reason why the SDGs are a long way from being achieved before their 2030 target deadline.
Exactly how complex is set out in a paper in Nature this week. Economists Andrew Fanning and Kate Raworth of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab in Oxford, UK, describe a set of 35 social and ecological indicators that attempts to provide some answers to the questions being examined by the panel. They report 13 ecological indicators that draw on the Planetary Boundaries framework, developed by environmental scientists. These are the numerical ‘boundaries’ for nine Earth-system processes — including air pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss — that regulate the Earth’s stability and resilience. Seven of the nine have been breached. They also measure 22 social indicators that connect specifically to other SDGs, including the number of undernourished people (in line with SDG 2: zero hunger), adults who cannot read or write (SDG 4: quality education) and those lacking access to safely managed water and sanitation (SDG 6: clean water and sanitation). Between 2000 and 2022, the researchers find that, whereas global GDP has more than doubled, “the increase in ecological overshoot would have to halt immediately” to safeguard Earth-system stability by 2050.
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