The UN is advocating for a GDP alternative – can social science provide one?

A UN High-level expert group has set out recommendations to redefine how we measure progress, moving past the gross domestic product (GDP) as a metric. The group was established by the UN Secretary General after extensive intergovernmental deliberations at the UN, which culminated in the 2024 Pact for the Future. One of the pact’s many action items was to develop indicators that complement and go beyond GDP. But what prompted this?

As early as 1934, Simon Kuznets, the architect of modern GDP and national accounting, issued a warning the world has since largely ignored: “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” Over nine decades later, GDP remains the dominant lens through which governments and international institutions assess progress, allocate resources, and make the case for policy.

In reality, GDP measures only money flows. It tallies transactions but cannot capture how wealth is distributed, whose lives improve, or what environmental costs are left behind. In GDP’s logic, clearing a forest counts as progress as much as investing in public health. Meanwhile, some of society’s most valuable contributions, like unpaid care work, remain invisible. GDP may track economic activity, but it falls short of measuring what shapes human wellbeing.

As GDP growth remains the gospel of progress, inequality has risen and trust in public institutions has collapsed. GDP-centrism has arguably worsened the crises of recent decades: the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate emergency, and technological disruption of labour markets. The current process to establish internationally agreed-upon progress indicators beyond GDP is, therefore, a sorely needed, urgent, but fragile opportunity to break out of the GDP trap.

The importance of a UN-led effort

The landmark report prepared by the UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP titled Counting What Counts: A Compass of Progress for People and Planet, was released last month and offers an alternative vision of progress: equitable, inclusive and sustainable well-being. The report proposes a dashboard of thirty-one new suggested indicators to “complement and go beyond” GDP, including  economic metrics such as household disposable income per person, environmental elements such as a country’s greenhouse gas emissions and levels of particulate matter in the air, as well as social measures of wellbeing such as perceptions of loneliness. The indicators provide a starting point towards a broader set of measures to underpin policy efforts at various levels.

The report has kicked off an intergovernmental negotiation process, co-facilitated by the governments of Guyana and Spain under the UN General Assembly, aimed at setting new parameters for national and global policymaking. The first informal consultation made clear that careful stewardship will be needed to keep the process impactful and policy-relevant, without duplicating or fragmenting existing efforts. With start of discussions on a framework to succeed the Sustainable Development Goals scheduled for September 2027, the Beyond GDP process could provide a stronger statistical foundation for economic policymaking that delivers for people and planet.

Expanding the economic lens

One of the recommendations of the report is to further develop headline summary indicators that are more easily understood by policymakers. These would give a birds-eye view of progress, compared to the complex dashboard of metrics proposed. They are meant to transparently and rigorously capture the key dimensions of progress, building on the work initiated by the expert group. It is important that any scientific committee set up to develop such an aggregate indicator, draws insights from a wide range of perspectives and insights, including from the social sciences and other knowledge systems such as indigenous knowledges.

The Group’s response draws on decades of research and on national and international efforts to measure progress, including through the Sustainable Development Goals, for their report. The launch of the intergovernmental process has provided impetus to the need for promoting convergence in this work for policy impact.

While economists and statisticians will remain at the heart of the Beyond GDP technical processes, limitations of GDP make clear that economics alone cannot capture what human wellbeing looks like. With this in mind, the proposed indicators, championing the social sciences, include peace, human rights, planetary stability, health, work, education, security, and social cohesion. The framework is explicitly intergenerational, designed not just to capture how societies are functioning today, but to track whether what we are building will endure for future generations.

The inclusion of such qualitative indicators opens up space for insights and technical innovations from fields such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology which engage in understanding many dimensions of wellbeing, from social cohesion, cultural meaning to trust, and community belonging. Broadening the epistemic frame to include indigenous and local knowledges would also enable the incorporation of contextual and experiential insights central to wellbeing.

Together, these disciplines and knowledge systems offer the possibility to connect measurable indicators to lived social realities. Designing indicators which are both meaningful and not too technically and logistically complex, will need innovation and genuine inter- and transdisciplinary engagement. This calls for creativity, deliberate inclusivity and time. If the international process can provide the space and be receptive to such efforts, the results could have a far-reaching impact on how we understand and measure what really matters for human and planetary wellbeing.

Where politics meets measurement

There remain, both technical and political challenges. Reaching consensus on a set of metrics that represent well-being without losing important dimensions (especially hard-to-capture subjective dimensions), risking duplication, relying on opaque and overly complex calculations, and running into statistical capacity challenges across a range of national contexts will be a difficult ask.

Adopting a new metric at the global level also presents governance challenges. The report’s recommendation on cross-country spill-over indicators, alongside the dashboard indicators which are focused primarily on domestic and subnational progress, could further complicate consensus-building.

The global economy remains deeply embedded in GDP-centric processes and outcomes, and the current climate marked by intensifying geopolitical competition, ongoing conflicts and fractured alliances, only compounds these pressures.

Yet there is momentum. The Sevilla Commitment, adopted at the fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, explicitly names GDP-centric rules governing concessional finance, credit ratings, and debt sustainability as barriers to sustainable development. The Global Alliance for Beyond GDP, launched in 2025 by Spain, the OECD, UNCTAD, and SEGIB, backed by more than thirty countries, commits finance ministries, statistical agencies, and multilateral development banks to translating any new beyond GDP framework into operational decision-making. Complementary initiatives, including the Roadmap to Eradicate Poverty Beyond Growth and the proposal for a International Panel on Inequality can also add further impetus.

Many hands to make the new metric work

Delivering this agenda requires action by various stakeholders, as the report notes. The intergovernmental process must remain inclusive and open to scientific input. Governments must embed well-being metrics into policymaking and strengthen the data systems behind them. The UN and international institutions will need to coordinate global reporting, financing and implementation support. International statistical bodies will be called on to refine indicators and close major measurement gaps, especially in low-capacity settings. And beyond public institutions, academia, civil society, the private sector, and the media, all have a role in driving innovation, accountability, and public momentum for change.

The coming months will be decisive. The quality of negotiations ahead, the election of the new UN Secretary General, and the IMF and World Bank annual meetings, will signal whether this process can produce frameworks that genuinely transform policy, or simply adds to the long literature of well-intentioned but unimplemented reform.