Politicians, investors, businesspeople, and the public around the world look to GDP as the primary judge of how well their countries are doing. For most of the post-World War II era, GDP growth has been taken as a sine qua non of progress. Countries have been said to be moving in the right direction when their market economies, as measured by GDP, were expanding. If growth was weak or, worse, negative, alarm bells would ring and a change of course would be called for. Governments, quite literally, lived and died on the basis of their success in growing GDP. This is changing, however. World leaders increasingly agree that countries need to move beyond GDP as their central measure of progress. This talk will explore some of the avenues “beyond GDP” currently under consideration. It will explore one of these avenues – comprehensive measures of national wealth – in detail and argue it offers considerable potential for displacing GDP from its place in the centre of the decision-making radar screen.
Robert Smith, Principal, Midsummer Analytics and Senior Associate, International Institute for Sustainable Development will be talking about Moving Beyond GDP through Comprehensive Wealth Accounting.
Read more here: https://www.iisd.org/projects/measuring-wealth-promote-sustainable-development
