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How do you measure progress? Specifically, what statistics, what numbers do you look at to see if a country is improving or backsliding?
The most well-known economic indicator around the world is surely gross domestic product, or GDP. You get that number by calculating the total market value of all the goods and services produced in a country over time.
Many politicians and policy makers talk in terms of GDP, almost to the point of obsession. It’s not hard to understand why. A country and its economy are an incredibly complex system, and people want to simplify things with a single number. Things are good if the number goes up. Things are bad if the number goes down.
However, that’s all really far too simple.
Note specifically that the definition of GDP doesn’t say anything about how a country’s goods and services are produced. It also doesn’t look at how “total market value” is shared and enjoyed among the population.
Things like human well-being and environmental sustainability aren’t considered in the GDP figure. There could be a country where just a few people own all the wealth and everyone else is practically enslaved, surrounded by ecological collapse – but the GDP number might still be nice and large. It might even be growing.
That’s not progress.
The need for better indicators of progress has been clear for some time, and many folks at the UN and elsewhere have been working on it.
Just yesterday, the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva discussed how to move beyond GDP and develop indicators to measure progress with human rights in mind. Human Rights Watch made a statement to the panel.
We emphasized key aspects of human well-being, based in fundamental human rights, that GDP ignores. These include education, health care, and a clean, sustainable environment. They all need to be measured when examining a country’s progress, or lack thereof.
Also, when these rights-based aspects are measured, they shouldn’t simply be averaged across a country’s entire population. That could hide critical imbalances between rich and poor.
Improvements in education or health care for a small minority, for example, may raise an indicator number nationally. However, if most people have seen no improvements, it makes no sense to talk about the country making progress overall.
When you hear that experts are discussing economic indicators, it may sound like a technical, even academic, debate. But the numbers our governments use to describe progress have a major impact on our rights and our lives.
We all deserve indicators beyond GDP.
