Expert Expressions
CP Rajendran is a geoscientist and an adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, and co-author of the book: The Rumbling Earth – The Story of Indian Earthquakes
The UN Secretary-General’s independent High-Level Expert Group on ‘Beyond GDP’ has officially released a global blueprint proposing 31 new indicators to complement—and go beyond—traditional GDP measures. Developed from the 2024 Pact for the Future, the framework is designed to measure progress by tracking human well-being, environmental sustainability and economic health. The new indicators are presented in a report titled ‘Counting What Counts’, prepared by a committee of scholars and policymakers co-chaired by economists Kaushik Basu of Cornell University and Nora Lustig of Tulane University.
Released on May 7, 2026, the document is the culmination of initiatives undertaken over several decades. Economic growth is traditionally measured via Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It drives profits, jobs and innovation, but does not inherently account for inequality or environmental damage. The benefits of unchecked growth have accrued to only a fifth of the world’s people, leaving societies to confront the Siamese twins of climate change and rising inequality. Proponents of Keynesian economic theory believe that we can grow our economies and reverse environmental degradation through techno-fixes—a belief at odds with reality. True prosperity, by contrast, requires an inclusive society, empowered individuals and a strong social contract that protects liberties and well-being.
Environmental economists such as Tim Jackson have called for an alternative approach—one that abandons the notion of GDP as a financial goal, given its reliance on unlimited consumerism. Instead, they urge countries to develop macroeconomic models that integrate economic, financial, social and ecological variables. Efforts to replace GDP as a measure of progress go back several decades.
Milestones in the development of alternate growth models
One of the strongest and earliest critiques of the prevailing growth model and its impact on biophysical limits came from a 1972 report titled ‘The Limits to Growth’, prepared by a group of scientists led by Donella Meadows. The report questioned the foundations of industrial society in light of the Earth’s biophysical limits and exponential population growth. In 2009, the world’s leading Earth-system scientists introduced the ‘planetary boundaries’ framework, which delineates safe spaces for human activities. The pursuit of unlimited economic growth and the surging extraction of natural resources are forcing humanity to transgress many of these boundaries, including those related to biodiversity loss, climate change, freshwater and land-system change, biogeochemical flows and novel entities. The next major milestone was the Brundtland Commission—formally the World Commission on Environment and Development—founded in 1983 by the UN and chaired by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The commission was dissolved in 1987 after releasing ‘Our Common Future’, which defined sustainable development as development that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.
The 2009 report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, examined the limits of GDP as a measure of societal progress and called for greater emphasis on well-being, equity and sustainability. In May 2023, the European Parliament marked a turning point in the battle of ideas around post-growth. The meeting opened with an address from Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, which concluded with a stirring call to join the ‘movements of movements’ to create an economic system based on sustainable prosperity, social justice, and sufficiency. The conference emphasised that GDP was only a measure of market production and consumption, revealing nothing about the distribution of wealth or social well-being. GDP, it argued, was built on a false premise: that economic growth equalled human progress. A detailed report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, prepared by the UN Rapporteur and released in 2024, flagged that traditional GDP growth exacerbated inequalities, depleted natural capital and failed to eradicate poverty. The report noted that ‘in the past four years alone, the world’s five richest men had more than doubled their fortunes, while 5 billion people had been made poorer’.
The May 2026 report
A key question confronting economists and planners is how to transition from GDP as a measure of human and economic development to a system that respects the Earth’s limits and gauges success through a Human Welfare Index. A theoretical foundation for such a post-growth vision has yet to be fully established. The UN-sponsored expert group was formed in May 2025, and its report, now released, ‘Counting What Counts: A Compass of Progress for People and Planet’, aims to address that gap. The report proposes global norms for measuring progress beyond GDP, along with a clear, practical implementation agenda: a conceptual framework, a dashboard of indicators, avenues for future headline indicators, and priorities for statistical development, research and national uptake. It puts forward 31 new indicators to ‘complement and go beyond’ the world’s main measure of economic growth.
The proposed annual indicators span several categories. Economic metrics include household disposable income per person. Environmental data cover a country’s greenhouse gas emissions and particulate matter levels. Health and education indicators—such as life expectancy and children’s performance in reading and mathematics—are also included, alongside well-being measures like the proportion of women and girls subjected to physical violence, sexual violence, or both. Human rights play a central role in the new metrics, providing a universal legal standard (exemplified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to hold governments and corporations accountable for their social impacts. Of the 31 proposed indicators, 15 are already among those used to measure progress toward the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The document warns, however, that implementing the new metrics faces several major challenges, primarily stemming from the difficulty of replacing deeply entrenched GDP with a broader set of well-being and sustainability measures.
Transforming an established framework into an accountability system requires sustained, long-term political commitment. As GDP is tied to sovereign debt metrics, international creditworthiness and institutional power, governments face the formidable task of restructuring deeply embedded systems. Measuring intangible and complex factors such as human well-being, equity, inclusion and ecosystem health also requires advanced statistical systems, technical expertise and continuous data-gathering capabilities. The governments of Spain and Guyana will now oversee the implementation of the report’s recommendations, including refining the indicators into a form that countries can agree on. India was among the few countries—along with several European nations—that requested the UN to establish a framework to go beyond GDP. The question now is: will India walk the talk and assume leadership to guide the world through a paradigm shift in our understanding of human well-being and to confront the impossibility of sustaining infinite growth on a planet of finite resources?
One fundamental requirement is to generate data-driven matrices on social progress, human development, environmental justice and climate goals. But India’s governance on these fronts is riddled with contradictions. For example, India champions ambitious climate goals on the global stage, yet these commitments frequently clash with on-the- ground realities.
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