Short Abstract:

This Roundtable proposes to engage academics and practitioners in a debate on the current state and future of the Beyond-GPD agenda. It consists of two academic paper presentations (one theoretical and the other empirical), followed by comments and an open discussion.

Long Abstract:

Since the 1950s, GDP has been the most widely used measure of a country’s economic progress and GDP growth has been an overarching goal. Yet GDP is essentially a measure of current market production and does not capture the economic wellbeing of households and their members. It does not consider how growth is distributed, the negative effects of growth on the environment and wellbeing of future generations, nor does it capture unpaid home and care work (Stiglitz, Sen & Fitoussi, 2009; Hoekstra, 2019). While criticisms of GDP as a measure of societal progress have been raised since its conception, the “Beyond-GDP” agenda gained momentum in the 1990s (Schoenaker, 2015; Hoekstra, 2019), following the publication of the Bruntland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987) and the first Human Development Report (UNDP, 1990).

An expanding literature on Beyond-GDP has put forward the limitations of GDP, proposed measurement systems and indicators to complement or replace GDP, made efforts to harmonize indicators and measurement systems and assessed their use in guiding public policy and public discourse (Chantel et al., 2014; Schoenaker, 2015). The capability approach and human development, the study of happiness/subjective wellbeing, and the sustainability/environment literature provide the theoretical underpinnings for this agenda (Fleurbuey, 2009). Some authors have proposed the integration of the human development and sustainable development frameworks into a consolidated sustainable human development paradigm (SHD), which provides both an integral guiding vision for policymakers and a framework for measurement and analysis (Neumayer, 2012; Biggeri and Mauro, 2018).

This Roundtable proposes to engage academics and practitioners in a debate on the current state and future of the Beyond GPD agenda. The questions to be considered include: What theoretical and empirical work is needed to advance the use of Beyond GDP indicators in public policy? How can the capability approach and the human development paradigm contribute to the measurement and analysis of societal progress? To what extent has the Beyond GDP agenda been adopted by policymakers? How has it impacted the work of organizations like UNDP, HDRO? What factors foster and constrain its use? How can the HDCA community contribute to this agenda?

The Roundtable will begin with presentations of two academic papers. The first paper by Mario Biggeri and Andrea Ferrannini titled “The ‘winds of change’: the SPES framework on Sustainable Human Development” aims to provide both scholars and policymakers with a novel framework named SPES (Sustainability Performances, Evidence and Scenarios) for the analysis and measurement of SHD processes, by placing economic development and human flourishing within social and environmental boundaries. This is done by combining the global policy framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with the theoretical insights of the capability approach and the human development paradigm, together with other critical perspectives and schools of thought. It emphasizes the need for a clear integrated vision of SHD, appropriate measurement systems, a political economy perspective which identifies the conditions that need to change to make this alternative vision possible, and broad policy discussion involving all societal actors.

The second paper by Sophie Mitra, Ann Mitchell, and Daniel Aromí titled “The Beyond GDP Agenda in policy discourses” aims to evaluate for two countries (Canada, United States) the extent to which the Beyond-GDP narrative has been adopted in political debates. The study analyzes the use of GDP and Beyond-GDP related keywords in transcriptions of congressional (US) and parliamentary (Canada) sessions in each country over a thirty-year period (1994-2023). It conducts a frequency analysis of the text and estimates a Beyond-GDP frequency index (number of Beyond-GDP keywords as a percentage of total words in the transcription) and a GDP frequency index (number of GDP keywords as a percentage of total words in the transcripts) for each year and country. The paper then uses a natural language processing method known as textual entailment to analyze the frequency of usage of the two classes of keywords in different contexts or topics of discussion. Preliminary results indicate that in both countries Beyond-GDP keywords appear less frequently than GDP keywords. While the Beyond-GDP frequency index rose over time in both countries, the increase was greater in Canada than the US. The most frequently used Beyond-GDP keywords in both countries are similar and relate to environmental considerations (environment, green, climate change, global warming, ecology), wellbeing (happiness, wellbeing, inequality, quality of life, happiness) and broad notions of sustainable development (sustainability, inequality).