Genuine Progress Indicator 2.0: Pilot Accounts for the US, Maryland, and City of Baltimore 2012–2014

For over thirty years the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) has been used to evaluate economic performance, quantify benefits and costs of growth, and predict effects of policy changes on economic wellbeing. The popularity and use of the metric is increasing partially in response to new global demands for metrics that go beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, because the basic GPI accounting protocols have yet to be consistently updated to respond to theoretical critiques, new valuation methods, and new data sources a proliferation of studies at the global, national and sub-national level contain widely divergent methodologies. Because of this, GPI practitioners have called for a new, consistent framework to guide future GPI studies – GPI 2.0. This paper is an attempt to operationalize some of the concepts that have emerged from GPI 2.0 deliberations online and at recent workshops in the form of GPI 2.0 pilot accounts for the US, State of Maryland, and City of Baltimore. The goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of multi-scale GPI accounts that provide a more accurate measure of current economic welfare than GDP and that incorporate new methods and sources of information to replace many of the outdated aspects of the prevailing GPI approach.