Economic Policy-Making Beyond GDP An Introduction

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) started to be used during World War II to measure the material production needs of the conflict. Throughout the decades, several issues have been identified with measuring economic success via this single indicator. Most prominently, GDP fails to inform decision makers on how the benefits of growth spread across the population, and to what extent these are concentrated in certain pockets of society. Moreover, it does not take into account the depletion of natural resources and environmental sustainability more broadly. As these have become increasingly pressing concerns for policymakers and the public at large, over the past decade, statistical institutes (including Eurostat) have been developing new complementary indicators, which have been embraced to various degrees by several governments and international organisations. At the current juncture, the challenge is to bring these indicators into more active policy-making in a sensible and manageable way. This paper therefore reviews the pros and cons of some of the ongoing efforts, in Europe and beyond, laying out potential avenues for future scholarship on the topic.