Going Beyond GDP: Making the leap from measurement to policy

This blog is by Alistair Whitby, Senior Policy Officer at the World Future Council one of the 7 partners of the BRAINPOol project. The post discusses some of the project's recent conclusions on how to broaden the measures of progress in societies. 

Turn on the news on any given day and you would be forgiven for thinking that market growth was the answer to all our problems. At a time of economic fragility it is perhaps unsurprising that the minds of policy makers tend to return frequently to the question of kick-starting growth. But the opposite perspective, that the objectives that have dominated economic policy for the last 40 years – maximising Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and market efficiency – are not only inadequate goals for society but might even be part of the problem, is becoming increasingly mainstream.

But how can this emerging realisation that we need broader methods of measuring the progress of our societies start to have an impact in shaping politics and policy? It was to tackle this question that the BRAINPOoL project was set up two and a half years ago and some of its recent conclusions seem to be gaining traction:

People Power

One problem we encountered frequently in the project was the current disconnect between the Beyond GDP movement and the general public. While there is great demand from parts of civil society for positive social and environmental change, people tend not to think in terms of indicators, and thus the measurement debate has so far often been left to experts. This needs to change. If we are going to deal seriously with the issue of ‘what really matters’, we are going to have to make much better efforts at actually asking people what matters to them. Beyond GDP concepts need to be rooted in processes, goals and targets that have legitimacy. Citizens should be involved in selecting political priorities.

The good news is that there are positive signs of change. A diverse array of people from social scientists and citizens groups to NGOs and psychologists are now actively engaged in the alternative indicators debate. Furthermore, whether ‘what matters’ to the public turns out to be job security, health, quality of life, environmental sustainability, social cohesion or overall well-being, all of these things can now be more accurately measured, providing policymakers with robust options for new policy objectives. As noted in the conclusions of last week’s EESC event ‘Let’s Talk Happiness’, these developments mean Beyond GDP can act as an instrument promoting democratic renewal, enabling citizens to make informed, democratic choices with greater proximity to the policy making process.

A New Story of Progress

A key element to winning public support will be communicating a compelling Beyond GDP narrative that provides an alternative story to the current growth-at-all-costs mantra, showing the real differences that the use of alternative indicators will make to policies and outcomes. To be successful indicators must connect with things that have impact on people’s lives (good jobs, equality, security and happiness) highlighting problems and pointing towards solutions. This beyond GDP narrative needs to be able to win votes if it is to become mainstream, and it needs to explain in a consistent way how the world is. Articulating a more holistic vision of progress which strongly resonates with the public should not prove too problematic, however, as the broad themes of this agenda match the public’s preferences to a far greater degree than growth pure and simple. International surveys consistently support this impression.

The advent of big data, wearable devices and mobile technology are converging to allow the creation of new, more timely Beyond GDP indicators that can give us real-time impressions of health, well-being, environmental and social trends, providing a readily available alternative picture to the regular quarterly economic data. Daily air pollution updates are already available in many cities, while apps that track the happiness levels of wearers throughout the day are providing valuable new insights on the foundations of human well-being.

New Ways of Making Policy

All this innovation does pose challenges for policy however. We found a number of barriers to ‘going beyond GDP’ that relate to the particular difficulties for policy-making of adopting a more holistic, multi-dimensional view of progress. Innovation and experimentation will be needed (for example considering combinations of policies that have not been tried before). This shift will require the ability to manage the greater complexities of the world outside of economic statistics, and without falling back on the standard economic thinking and models. This will not be easy, but is both necessary and possible.

One of the exciting aspects of the BRAINPOoL project’s Final Conference was to hear experienced policy makers from France, the UK, Finland and Italy confirm that the adoption of B-GDP indicators can really change the priorities of political action. Imagine what labour market policy could look like if explicitly driven by the aim of maximising well-being: A “living” minimum wage? Flexible or shorter working week? Generous provision of parental leave? The positive benefits for society resulting from a Beyond GDP shift are becoming abundantly clear.

- Alistair Whitby

 

To read more about the BRAINPOoL project’s results please see www.brainpoolproject.eu or read our short summary of results and recommendations here.

Let’s Talk about Child Well-being

Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), Wikigender and Wikichild invite you to participate in this online discussion.

“HOW SHOULD CHILD WELL-BEING BE MEASURED IN VIEW OF FUTURE DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORKS?”

Open from Wednesday 19 June until Tuesday 2 July 2013.

The discussion will be officially launched at the HBSC 30th Anniversary Meeting and aims to spark discussion on the most effective means of measuring child well-being and how these measures should be applied to upcoming development frameworks.

This discussion seeks to explore a variety of questions including:

1. What is the actual state of child well-being today?
2. What are the most important domains of well-being – specifically for children?
3. What policies have had the most impact on children in the past? 
4. Should there be a child development goal in the Post 2015 framework?

We would like to hear your views, lessons learned and best practices or policies on measuring child well-being.

Background

Measuring child well-being has traditionally rested on economic measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP); however, it is now widely accepted that the well-being of the nation is influenced by a broad range of factors including economic performance, quality of life, the state of the environment, sustainability, equality, as well as individual well-being.

Over the last decade, organisations around the world have been developing new indicators of progress that look beyond GDP and economic growth when measuring child well-being.

The well-being of children is high on the agenda for policy makers and this online consultation, hosted by Wikichild, seeks to engage discussion on the most effective means of measuring child well-being and how these measures should be applied to upcoming development frameworks such as the Post-2015 agenda.

You can post a comment in a few clicks by going to the “Contribute!” section of the online discussion page. Here is the shortened link to the discussion page: http://bit.ly/19ECjl  and the hashtag for Twitter is #childwellbeing .

To find out more about the questions asked and how to participate, please click here.

Make sure your voice heard!

Robbie Lawrence,

Wikichild Coordinator 

The Economics of Happiness

On the 15^th to 17^th March the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC) hosted its second international conference entitled The Economics of Happiness in Byron Bay, Australia.  Last year the event was held in San Francisco following the release of the feature film “The Economics of Happiness”.  The conference and the film seek to promote the economic, social and environmental benefits of re-localising economies. 

Attended by 450 people the conference was host to a range of international thought leaders on the activities and benefits of localization.  International speakers included author and the developer of the 350.org international climate change campaign Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva and economists James Skinner and Mark Anielski, who is an early developer of broader measures of progress which incorporate wellbeing of citizens.  

Mark Anielski called for local governments to take an audit on all community assets, monetary and non-monetary, and to move a full accounting of all that is of value in a government area, such as open spaces, roads, forests, rivers and libraries and all aspects considered of “value” to the community.  Then to take this inventory and to gather information on what is important to people, what is of value and what they want to utilize from the community.  In this way a richer picture of the economy is developed.  This description is part of a model which has been developed that is entitled Genuine Wealth.

The main streams of the plenary sessions and interactive workshops covered the themes of educating the new generation to thrive in a rapidly changing society, economics and money systems for building resilience in local communities, local food production including farming and home gardens, social cohesion including culture and heritage and methods for creating change.  

The founder and director of ISEC, Helena Norberg-Hodge, was motivated to create this ISEC after spending many years in Ladakh, a peaceful rural part of northern India, and seeing first hand the impacts of new economic policies on the economic, social and environmental aspects of communities there.  

One of the key benefits identified throughout the conference was the way in which choosing to invest time and resources in our local communities leads to greater resilience and mitigation of risk felt by the shocks experienced in financial markets, which have affected communities around the world.   The localization movement, which the conference promoted, is offered as a counter balance to some of the negative impacts on communities which have been felt as a result of policies stemming from the globalization of trade.

The event program including the complete list of speakers and topics can be found at:  http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/conference-program

Tani Shaw 

Tani Shaw is a PhD Scholar with the Institute for Sustainable Futures and a member of the Global Progress Research Network (GPRNet).  Tani attended the Economics of Happiness Conference held in Byron Bay, Australia on 15-17 March, 2013.

Invisible Women: Making Women Count

As part of the Wikiprogress on Gender Equality series, this progblog article is bought to you by Angela Hariche and Karen Barnes Robinson. 

They graduated together five years ago, and took a job in the same firm in the same city. Three years later, he can afford a down payment on a house and she cannot.

Her day starts with fetching water and firewood and cleaning the compound. Once she has taken care of the needs of the men and children, she leaves for the marketplace to sell vegetables.

She has three young children. Finding it difficult to make ends meet, she is caring for her elderly neighbour on an hourly basis, while working a part-time job as a maid in a local hotel. Neither job comes with healthcare benefits.

These women are not victims. They are agents of change who bring resources, knowledge and capacity to their households, communities and societies. Without these women, the world would be worse off. Yet, they are still not being recognised, paid or valued for the work they do, and society as a whole suffers. Why is it this way? For much of the past two decades, the global economy has experienced a period of significant growth and overall rates of poverty have declined. However, inequalities between men and women, between rich and poor and between urban and rural communities remain rife. Why are women, in particular, not benefiting from global progress?

First, women are not being recognised. They are undervalued. In 2009, the European Commission launched a campaign to address the fact that on average, women earn 17.4% less than men. In the US, research has shown that one year after college, women earn only 80% of what their male colleagues earn. Why aren’t enough women being represented on boards or in politics? Can any of our current measures for economic performance address this issue? There are indicators that measure the percentage of women in senior positions over time but  if a country’s success was based on it, you can bet leaders would work a little harder to appoint women in top positions. If this indicator was important and recognised, imagine what might change.

Second, women are not being counted. They are invisible. Women are 50 percent of the population yet up until now, a lot of the work they do isn’t being considered in current measures of economic resources. What would it mean if all of the work that women do around the world was actually counted and measured over time? Recent research from the UN Research Institute for Social Development argues that if unpaid care work, mostly done by women, was assigned a monetary value, it would amount to between 10 to 39 per cent of GDP. Clearly there is a powerful economic argument for beginning to value women’s work. Unless this work is acknowledged in economic data, then policies will fail to target and support women and their contributions to the global economy will remain invisible. Once we are able to see the work they are doing, we can start counting it. What if there was an indicator called the household work indicator and it too was just as recognized as GDP?

Third, women are not able to access the same opportunities as men. They are marginalised. Globalisation and development processes have transformed men and women’s roles and relations, but this has not necessarily translated into more access to resources and greater empowerment for women or more gender equality. More women end up in the informal sector in ‘bad jobs’, and as recent research by the OECD Development Centre has shown, there is a ‘feminisation of bad jobs’, where discrimination against women leads to them being stuck in jobs with poor working conditions and low or no pay. This has major implications for the health and welfare of their households and their own economic and physical security. Little or no income means that women are also not saving or driving consumption and economic growth. What if there was an indicator called the well-being indicator and it was a measure of economic health of a society and it was fully recognised and supported like the mighty GDP?

We are now in 2013. The world has changed since 1930s when GDP was created. While we recgonise that GDP is a good measure of production, we call for equally powerful indicators that incorporate a broader range of factors including informal work. If these existed, we might see a difference in the world. Can we have sustainable economic growth and global progress when not only are there more women in worse jobs, but they are also consistently paid less for the work that they do or not paid at all? It is a question of supporting women’s rights and gender equality, but it is also a question of supporting smart economics by making sure that measures for progress in societies take women into account. There is considerable work being done on this at the OECD and around the world. However, unleashing the economic and social potential of women and making them visible in government policy is a major global challenge, one that would reap significant economic benefits if  really and truly supported. This would be revolutionary. In the end, it comes down to the fact that what doesn’t count isn’t counted, and we only count what we can see. We have to start seeing women and the work they do.

By Angela Costrini Hariche and Karen Barnes Robinson

See the Wikiprogress Focus on Gender Equality article for further reading.