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|
| Title: |
Genuine Progress Indicator |
| Resource type: |
Report/study |
| Topics: |
Business, Individual Choices, Statewide/Global
|
| Keywords: |
indicators, indicator, progress |
| Audience: |
All
|
| Region: |
Minnesota Statewide, Outside Minnesota
|
| Summary: |
A more realistic measure of economic success than Gross Domestic Product because it counts environmental degradation and inequality as costs and volunteering, household work, and ecological restoration as benefits. |
| Content: |
Research by Redefining Progress (RP), an Oakland, California-based public policy organization, helps to reveal quantifiable social, economic and ecological costs of economic growth. It describes the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which is a comprehensive measure of well-being in the United States that incorporates environmental and social factors into the traditional government indicator, gross domestic product (GDP). It is a dollar figure, just as the GDP is one number.
But instead of just counting the amount of money that changes hands -- what the GDP reports-- the GPI factors in social, environmental, and economic phenomena that diminish, as well as enhance, people's quality of life, but that are not typically measured in monetary terms or included in economic analyses. For example, costs of crime and family breakdown decrease the GPI, whereas unpaid housework increase the GPI. The GPI also factors in the degree to which the US, instead of living off the yearly "interest" produced by abundant natural assets (a steady but limited supply of trees, fish, clean air, fresh water, etc.), is, in specific cases, depleting nature's principal. The GPI can be seen a richer picture of the economy, and a fuller assessment of progress.
The 2006 GPI report can be accessed at http://www.rprogress.org/publications/2007/GPI%202006.pdf The 2002 GPI report (released in March 2004) is available on-line in a PDF file at http://www.rprogress.org/publications/2004/gpi_march2004update.pdf
More information about the GPI is also available on the web site below. According to the authors of this report, their analysis shows that the GDP has overestimated the health of the US economy by $7 trillion.
See also the Happy Planet Index, which combines environmental impact with human well-being to measure the environmental efficiency with which, country by country, people live long and happy lives, at http://www.happyplanetindex.org
For reports from Minnesota state government on assessing progress using a Minnesota Progress Indicator, based upon thinking similar to that behind the GPI, see http://www.gda.state.mn.us/pdf/1999/SmartSignals.pdf and http://www.gda.state.mn.us/pdf/2000/eqb/measure.pdf
For developing work on calculating a community genuine progress index, see http://www.gpiatlantic.org/ for work being done by GPIAtlantic, a non-profit research and education organization that is creating a Genuine Progress Index for the small Canadian province of Nova Scotia.
Since 1997, GPIAtlantic has produced more than 80 carefully-researched reports on topics within the six main categories that make up the Genuine Progress Index - living standards, population health, time use, community vitality, education and environmental quality.
GPIAtlantic has produced ground-breaking research on the real costs and benefits of the province's energy consumption, transportation system, solid waste disposal, and air quality. It has analyzed Nova Scotians' working hours, obesity, tobacco use, and gambling habits. Its reports frequently cover subjects that have never been properly studied here before.
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| Website: |
http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm |
| Suggested by: |
Philipp Muessig
|
| Added: |
01/17/01 |
| Updated: |
12/29/09 |
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