This UN policy brief makes a measurement argument the SDGs have long implied: what a society counts shapes what it does. It states plainly that GDP has become the proxy for value, wealth and progress, and that this reliance misdirects policy and finance. Its proposal is modest in form and large in ambition, a shared dashboard of a limited number of indicators that reach beyond output to well-being, inequality, human capital and the state of nature.
The headline
The brief does not ask to abolish GDP. It asks Member States to complement it with a UN “value dashboard” of a limited number of key indicators, ideally not more than 10–20, produced by an independent high-level expert group and delivered by March 2024 in preparation for the Summit of the Future. It is deliberately not a single composite score. The brief argues that harmful activity such as deforestation, overfishing and burning fossil fuels can raise GDP, while unpaid care work, the value of health and the depletion of nature go uncounted.
The numbers
- A dashboard, not a score. An initial value dashboard of “ideally not more than 10–20 indicators” that go beyond GDP, to be delivered by March 2024.
- Growth versus depletion. Global GDP has doubled since 1970, while the depletion of resources has more than tripled.
- Uncounted care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, women spent an estimated 512 billion hours globally doing additional unpaid childcare work.
- Nature off the books. Since 1970, global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have declined by 68 per cent, and more than a million species are at risk of extinction.
- Oceans. Marine plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, affecting at least 267 species.
- The accounting standard is moving. The System of National Accounts, in which GDP is embedded, was revised in 1968, 1993 and 2008, with the next revision due by 2025.
The counting angle
This is, at heart, a document about counting. The brief names GDP as a metric that was built to solve twentieth-century problems and now fails to capture the informal economy, unpaid household work, distributions and environmental loss. Its remedy is not rhetoric but statistical infrastructure: sound and disaggregated data, a Statistical Commission process to select and verify indicators, and a major capacity-building initiative so that developing countries can actually produce the new numbers. It leans on SDG target 17.19, which already calls on Member States to develop measurements of progress that complement GDP. The insight SDGCounting keeps returning to is here in explicit form, that a single summary indicator hides trade-offs, and that what is left uncounted is rarely valued or acted on.
Watch & read
- Valuing What Counts: A Framework to Progress Beyond GDP, the full policy brief (United Nations, Our Common Agenda).
- OECD, How’s Life? 2024, a working example of the multi-dimensional well-being measurement this brief envisions.
Figures are quoted as reported in the policy brief, which draws on the UN Sustainable Development Goals Report 2022 and the High-level Committee on Programmes report of the same name. Numeric ranges such as 10–20 indicators are the brief’s own framing.