Call for Action
Renowned experts from all G7 countries and around the world launch a Call for Action to the G7 at the Final 2022 G7 Summit in Elmau, Germany today. The Call urges the G7 under the German G7 Presidency to show leadership in rethinking progress and adopting new measures of prosperity that move beyond GDP as a key policy yardstick. The group of global experts, from institutions such as Oxford University, ADBI, ISPI, GSI, Yale, IISD, PSE, describe the devastating consequences that the primacy of GDP as goalpost indicator has had, including: “Grand societal and global challenges ranging from pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss, through debt crises, to widespread and growing inequalities and social divides.” Rather than the traditional narrow focus on GDP, the authors call on the G7 to measure prosperity through internationally comparable metrics covering
- Social Well-Being;
- Economic Well-Being; and
- Environmental Sustainability
The German G7 Presidency, which has set itself the goal “to achieve tangible improvements for the people”[1], has a unique opportunity to recouple the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of well-being and track the progress of nations through new metrics. An appropriate balance across these dimensions will help achieve equitable, inclusive, and sustainable outcomes aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals and respecting the earth’s resources.
The Call for Action recommends that the G7 take the following steps:
- Establish a G7 Working Group to explore the measurement of progress beyond GDP, with the objective of identifying a comprehensive but concise set of indicators focused on multidimensional well-being across G7 countries to be regularly monitored in the future.
- Use this new multidimensional measurement framework to align the G7 members around concrete policies for advancing social, economic, and environmental well-being beyond GDP.
- Promote data collection to monitor multidimensional well-being and its distribution.
The Call for Action is published on behalf of the Think7 group, a group of leading think tanks from the G7 countries, and signed by 35 institutions and 86 individuals from 6 countries, including researchers from all G7 member states, members of think tanks, NGOs, and international organizations like UNESCO, OECD, as well as government officials.
The Call for Action is the culmination of comprehensive policy-advice given to the G7 from January to June 2022 on the matter of rethinking prosperity and measuring progress. It builds on an associated Think7 Policy Brief Towards Economic and Social Prosperity Measurement Beyond GDP, an Issue Paper of the Think7 Task Force on Social Cohesion, Economic Transformation and Open Societies and the Final Think7-Communiqué of the Think7 experts mandated with issuing research-based policy recommendations for the G7.
[1] As announced in the G7 Presidency Programme “Policy Priorities for Germany’s G7 Presidency in 2022, January 2022; The Press and Information Office of the Federal Government of Germany, https://www.g7germany.de/resource/blob/998352/2000328/6cb78b73c9f000183e69738c255d9cc9/2022-01-21-g7-programm-en-data.pdf?download=1