cultivar_22_Final_EN

56 ANALYSIS AND PROSPECTIVE STUDIES CULTIVAR Issue 22 APRIL 2021 welfare-reducing ones. For example, environmental damages such as an oil spill increases GDP because of the associated cost of clean-up and remediation, but it obviously detracts from overall well-being. GDP also leaves out many components that enhance well-being but do not involve monetary transactions and therefore fall outside the market. For example, the act of picking vegetables from a garden and cooking them for family or friends is not included in GDP, while buying a similar pre-prepared meal in a grocery store involves an exchange of money and a subsequent increase in GDP. Moreover, at the level of the person, GDP says nothing about how economic resources are distributed across population groups nor on the many aspects beyond monetary metrics that are important for their well-being, such as the need to feel valued and respected by others, the extent to which aspirations are fulfilled, and the care and affection that are provided by close family and friends. It says nothing either about the sustainabil- ity of economic activities, in particular whether these occur at the expense of the natural environment. In fact, GDP’s inventor, Simon Kuznets, warned against the misuse of GDP. He stressed that GDP is a measure of output, not of well-being. And in 1968, in one of his most famous speeches, Senator Robert Kennedy eloquently highlighted the limitations of traditional economic metrics: “[Gross National Product] counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage…It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall…Yet, [it] does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play… It measures neither our wit nor our courage neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short except that which makes life worthwhile.” When the first criticisms to GDP were raised in the 1970s, amid worries about ecological limits to growth, some attempts were made to correct GDP for its most evident flaws. In the late 70s, however, the interest in alternatives approaches to GDP diminished, with other issues taking centre stage, such as stagflation or rapid increases in unemploy- ment rates. Interest in alternatives or complements to GDP resumed progressively during the 1990s. Emblem- atic of this new trend was the creation of the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), which com- bines GDP with measures of health and educational achievement. Although synthesising only a limited amount of information and being more relevant for comparisons of developing countries than for com- parisons of more advanced countries, it remains one of the few composite indexes that are regularly com- piled and widely disseminated to allow systematic cross-country comparisons. In 1992, the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro brought the notion of Sus- tainable Development into the policy debate and pro- moted the use of sustainable development indicators. This was followed by the adoption of Agenda 2030 by all UN countries in 2015 who agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals, 169 tar- gets and a set of 232 indicators The 2008 financial crisis gave further impetus to the quest for more comprehensive measures of well-be- ing and progress. The perception that the economic growth of the early 2000s had not lifted all boats, and that the costs of the crisis have disproportionately fallen upon those who had least benefited from the preceding economic expansion has progressively led to a re-assessment of the goals of human progress. In recognition of GDP’s inadequacy to capture many of the critical dimensions of human lives, a strong movement has emerged to go “beyond GDP” and bring into greater focus other measures that capture people’s living conditions and the quality of their lives. The discussion and research on well-being measures has found expression in a number of initia- tives. The report by the Commission on the Measure- ment of Economic Performance and Social Progress, (the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi report) published in 2009 concluded that the time was “ right to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring [Gross National Product] measures everything ... except that which makes life worthwhile.