GDP was never designed to measure whether people are doing well. These briefs cover the reports that try to: how human development and multidimensional poverty are actually moving, and the growing push to put a small set of Beyond-GDP measures alongside the growth number. It is the question SDGCounting exists for, what we choose to count as progress.
Human Development Report 2025
Human development has flatlined even as AI races ahead. UNDP argues the outcome is a matter of choice, not destiny, and reads the AI moment through people, not models.
Read the brief → UNDP & OPHI · 2025Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2025
1.1 billion people are multidimensionally poor across 109 countries, more than half of them children, and nearly four in five face overlapping climate hazards.
Read the brief → UN DESA · 2025World Social Report 2025
Economic insecurity has spread well beyond the poor, and eroding trust is straining the social contract the SDGs depend on.
Read the brief → World Bank · 2024Poverty, Prosperity and Planet 2024
The World Bank’s poverty flagship: at the current pace, ending extreme poverty is generations away, and the poverty and climate goals now collide.
Read the brief → OECD · 2024How’s Life? 2024
The OECD’s well-being scorecard across eleven dimensions: where life has improved since 2010, and where it has quietly worsened.
Read the brief → United Nations · 2023Valuing What Counts: Beyond GDP
The UN’s case for a small dashboard of measures to sit alongside GDP, so policy can finally track what a society actually values.
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