Beyond GDP

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) serves as the leading measure of development progress within and across countries. Yet it provides an incomplete picture of the different dimensions of sustainable development. In recent decades, Governments, civil society, and researchers have made the case for expanding the set of metrics that are relied upon to gauge progress and to guide policy. The International Environment Forum itself led a project on global solidarity accounting to propose an alternative concept. See our Accounting page.

Efforts to complement, or go beyond, GDP aim to re-define how we measure progress by placing people, planet, and prosperity at its center. Building on the 2030 Agenda, the UN Beyond GDP project reflects a shared and long-standing goal that has strong support globally. As the global caretaker of the sustainable development agenda with responsibility for setting norms for international statistical activities, the UN is uniquely placed to facilitate this work. The Secretary-General's report, Our Common Agenda, and the related policy brief on Beyond GDP, paved the way to a milestone agreement in the 2024 Pact for the Future in which Member States committed to a two-phased approach to advance this work: i) requesting the Secretary-General to appoint a High-Level Expert Group; and ii) calling for a subsequent intergovernmental process to consider the Group’s recommendations.

On 7 May 2025, the Secretary-General appointed the High-Level Expert Group. The 14 members of the independent Expert Group represent eminent scholars and experts from various domains, as well as reflecting gender and geographical diversity. The Group published an Interim Report in November 2025.

The Interim Report does not recommend the replacement of GDP as a measure of economic activity, but to complement and go beyond GDP. The concept of "Beyond GDP" encompasses five key principles. First, we must move beyond GDP to measure current material well-being more accurately. Second, we need to go beyond income to capture all aspects of well-being. Third, we must look beyond averages to address inequality and exclusion. Fourth, we need to think beyond today to ensure economic, environmental, social and institutional sustainability for future generations. Finally, we also need to account for well-being interconnectedness across countries.

A UN conference with leading economists on Beyond GDP was held in Geneva in January 2026. Afterwards the UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the global economy must move past GDP to avoid planetary disaster. The world’s accounting systems should place true value on the environment, with a transformation of the global economy to stop it rewarding pollution and waste. He said humanity’s future required the urgent overhaul of the world’s existing accounting systems that were driving the planet to the brink of disaster. “We must place true value on the environment and go beyond gross domestic product as a measure of human progress and well-being. Let us not forget that when we destroy a forest, we are creating GDP. When we overfish, we are creating GDP.”

While politicians and policymakers have prioritised growth, as measured by GDP, as the overarching economic goal, endless growth on a planet with finite resources is driving not only the climate and nature crisis but increasing inequality.

Guterres said: “Moving beyond gross domestic product is about measuring the things that really matter to people and their communities. GDP tells us the cost of everything, and the value of nothing. Our world is not a gigantic corporation. Financial decisions should be based on more than a snapshot of profit and loss.”

The Expert Group is devising a new dashboard of measures of economic success that takes “human well-being, sustainability and equity” into account. Its Interim Report argued that, as the world wrestled with repeated global shocks over the past two decades, the need for an economic transformation had become increasingly urgent – from the financial crash of 2008 to the Covid-19 pandemic. Those events were exacerbated by the “triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution” and, in addition, rapid technological change was upending labour markets and exacerbating growing inequality.

Prof Basu, a co-chair of the UN group, said: “Nations are so locked into the game of beating other nations in terms of the GDP metric, that the well-being of ordinary citizens and sustainability are getting ignored. If all the new income accrues to a few individuals, and the GDP grows, all citizens are expected to cheer. This is feeding hyper-nationalism, inequality and polarisation."

The other co-chair, Prof Lustig, said GDP had never been “designed to measure human progress, yet it remains the dominant benchmark of success. Economic growth can coexist with poverty, exclusion, violence, and serious violations of human rights – outcomes that remain largely invisible in conventional economic accounts … The group’s aim is to complement GDP, helping governments and the public assess whether development is truly improving human well-being, advancing equity, and safeguarding sustainability now and for future generations.”

The UN initiative follows a recent report that said current economic models are fundamentally flawed because they failed to account of the impact of climate shocks such as extreme weather disasters and tipping points, and could crash the global economy. These concerns come amid a growing debate in academia, civil society and policy circles about how to create economic structures that are compatible with greater equality and sustainability. These include green Keynesians or green growth advocates to post-growth initiatives, including doughnut, well-being and steady-state economics. Others are pushing for degrowth, which emphasises a planned reduction in damaging and unnecessary forms of production – specifically in richer countries – in favour of focusing on socially beneficial parts of the economy such as care, renewable energy and public transit.

Jason Hickel, a political economist, author and key proponent of the degrowth school of thought, says these ideas are gaining traction. He pointed to a recent survey that found 73% of nearly 800 climate policy researchers around the world support post-growth positions. He said that while he backed Guterres’s call to move beyond GDP, by itself that would not be enough. “A deeper system change is required. Specifically, we need to democratise control over production, which can enable us to change what we produce and for whom. The dominance of GDP is not an accident, it occurs because GDP measures what is valuable to capital. It is the structure of capitalism that ultimately must be overcome.”

SOURCES: https://www.un.org/en/beyondGDP
Interim Report https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/interim_report_high-level_exp…
Matthew Taylor in The Guardian 9 February 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/09/global-economy-tran…