measuring prosperity

The Making and Breaking of Trust in Modern Societies The perception that fellow citizens can be trusted has been pinpointed as pivotal for the functioning of modern political, economic, and social systems. It is one of the three indicators used in The World Policy Forum’s solidarity index. In this presentation, Professor Christian Albrekt Larsen discusses … Read more

Evaluating and Realizing the Value of Nature: Insights from the Changing Wealth of Nations database and examples from Indonesia The Changing Wealth of Nations (CWON) series of reports provides a database and analysis of the world’s wealth accounts spanning 146 countries, annually from 1995 to 2018. It tracks human capital, a wide range of natural … Read more

Toward a New Understanding of Governance: The Berggruen Governance Index Our primary goal in developing the Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) is to gain a better understanding of the provision of public goods. The BGI examines the varied performances of countries with a conceptual framework — the Governance Triangle — that incorporates democratic accountability and state … Read more

Mainstream economic statistics are a snapshot of the portion of the economy that falls inside the production boundary as defined in the System of National Accounts (SNA). This raises accounting challenges, given the economy’s reliance on largely unmeasured natural capital services. One issue is that the SNA records flow measures over the past. Augmenting them … Read more

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. … Read more

Replacing GDP by 2030 Rutger Hoekstra will discuss a strategy on how to replace GDP as the key indicator of society. As part of this, he will present an interdisciplinary synthesis of the main Beyond-GDP metrics created in the last 50 years. The basis for this synthesis is a Brundtland/Stiglitz conceptual framework which distinguishes WISE: … Read more

Measuring Well-Being Beyond GDP: The OECD Approach How well are economies doing for people? How sustainable is our way of living? Are societies thriving with purpose? These are the key questions that the OECD’s work on multidimensional well-being is addressing. To fill the gap between standard macroeconomic statistics and indicators that have a more direct … Read more