Irish Regions Office Website

November 26, 2007

GDP 'outdated' as indicator of wellbeing

The European Commission is working on a new initiative to measure the progress, wealth and wellbeing of nations, which aims to measure 'true' progress, taking environmental and social indicators into consideration.

A world statistics forum in June 2007 agreed that national statistical offices, academics and public and private bodies would work with civil society on new approaches, going beyond conventional economic indicators such as GDP which is widely used by economists to measure individual countries' economic performance but whose value as an indicator for the standard of living is considered to be limited. The Commission has already started to work on an index that would measure progress on environmental issues. Indicators planned for the environment include air pollution in big cities of Europe, the quality of the air that we breathe and the quality of water. However finding indicators for social issues could be more complicated. According to the Commission, the EU is committed to taking the lead in the move to integrate non-economic factors into policy-making by 2010. The aim of the high-level conference "Beyond GDP" was to highlight that moving towards a low-carbon economy, preserving biodiversity, promoting resource efficiency and achieving social cohesion are today as important as economic growth.

The Commission is to present a communication with a concrete roadmap for action by early 2008 and in 2009 a preliminary version of the EU indicator that would measure environmental progress and also use integrated accounting and other sub-indicators to improve policy-making is due to become operational with a preliminary version of an integrated environmental economic accounting system due to come on stream by 2010. Further details at: http://www.beyond-gdp.eu/

Posted by iroadmin at November 26, 2007 03:39 PM