The Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission's Quest to Get Beyond GDP
The Commission's aim was to identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress, to consider additional information required for the production of a more relevant picture, to discuss how to present this information in the most appropriate way, and to check the feasibility of measurement tools proposed by the Commission. The Commission's work was not focused on France, nor on developed countries, and its output has been made public, providing a template for every interested country or group of countries.
Economists Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi argue in their recent book, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up, GDP is a deeply flawed indicator of well-being. Their book is a streamlined version of the final report produced by the Commission to identify the limits of GDP and to outline new metrics that take things like education, gender equality and environmental sustainability into account.
The political reaction has been interesting. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron directed the Office for National Statistics to conduct a nationwide survey asking citizens what they believe should be used to measure happiness, with the goal of formulating policy “focused not just on the bottom line, but on all those things that make life worthwhile.”
In Germany, the Bundestag has established a commission on “Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life” to develop a more holistic measure of progress.
Reforms are under way in Italy, Australia, South Korea, Canada and the United States, where a project called State of the USA, supported by the National Academy of Sciences and numerous prominent foundations, has begun to track some alternative indicators of progress, which will eventually be accessible to citizens online.
A focused comment has come from Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton who recently stepped down as assistant treasury secretary in the Obama administration: “I think the disconnect between our measures of national income—which have been growing for eighteen months—and how people feel about their lives is raising interest in broader measures of society’s well-being”.
Joint author Jean-Paul Fitoussi, a French economist who served as coordinator of the Sarkozy commission has commented: "One thing that hasn’t happened is the creation of a permanent commission at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to develop a set of common standards, which was promised at the time and [is] crucial to lending any alternative system credibility. Assume you design a good measurement system for one country—how can you compare what is happening in another country? If you have a system, it has to be common; otherwise it has no validity. Invited to Britain for the unveiling of the Cameron initiative on measuring happiness, Fitoussi declined out of frustration. “I was invited, but I said no, because it’s a bit ridiculous: we will end this adventure with fifty systems of national accounting and measurement.”
Further reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment