Pardee Paper “Beyond GDP” is Released

A new paper called Beyond GDP: The Need for New Measures of Progress was published this month by the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and is now available electronically and in hard copy.  This is the fourth paper in The Pardee Papers series.

The paper was co-authored by Robert Costanza, the Gordon and Lulie Gund Professor of Ecological Economics and Director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont; Maureen Hart, Acting Executive Director of the Community Indicators Consortium and president of the consulting firm Sustainable Measures; Stephen Posner, a graduate student and research assistant at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics; and John Talberth, Senior Economist at the Center for Sustainable Economy.

The paper reviews the history of how and why the gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of economic activity, has become a widely accepted standard for measuring a country’s perceived overall progress in human development when that was never its intended purpose. The authors review other measurement methods that try to capture environmental and societal well-being in addition to economic growth and argue that a new indicator or set of indictors for measuring true human progress is urgently needed.

You may download a PDF of this paper or request a hard copy, free of charge, by emailing pardee@bu.edu.