Related Papers
The four approaches to measuring wellbeing
John Hawkins
There are essentially four approaches to constructing a better measure than GDP of whether the nation is making true progress in improving wellbeing; adjusting GDP to make it more suitable, replacing it with a ‘dashboard’ of alternative indicators, weighting these alternative indicators to form a composite indicator, and using peoples’ own reported assessments of their well-being.
Measuring wellbeing : The Herald/ Age lateral economics (Hale) index of Australia's wellbeing
2013 •
Nicholas Gruen
Right back to ancient times, people have tried to understand what human wellbeing is, and how it might be measured. There is no one answer to these questions. But nature - and human conversation - abhors a vacuum. In the 1930s and 40s national accounting was developed to help economic managers iron out economic booms and busts. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures the magnitude of trade taking place in the market economy. And rather like a new standard emerging (such as mp3 or mpeg format media) as GDP received more and more usage, somehow it came to be taken as a yardstick of economic progress.
Australian Economic Review
Constructing the Herald/Age - Lateral Economics Index of Australia's Wellbeing
2013 •
Nicholas Gruen
Asian-pacific Economic Literature
Gross national happiness
2009 •
Winton Bates
Lateral Economics
The Herald/Age - Lateral Economics Index of Australia’s Wellbeing
Nicholas Gruen
Lateral Economics has developed the Herald/Age – Lateral Economics(HALE) Index of wellbeing which builds a measure of wellbeing by correcting GDP for the numerous ways in which it fails to reflect wellbeing.
Mobilising alternative futures: generational accounting and the fiscal politics of ageing in Australia
Ben Spies-Butcher
Economists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting the tax base while increasing demands for social spending. Alongside other economic pressures associated with neoliberalism, this dynamic contributes to a politics of 'enduring austerity' that limits governments' fiscal discretion. The politics of population ageing reflects modelling techniques, such as generational accounting (GA), which, anticipating future deficits, create demands for policy action today to address projected intergenerational inequalities. Taking Australia as a case study, this paper explores the politics of GA in public budgetary processes. While existing critiques reject GA by arguing it relies on 'apocalyptic' or unreliable demography , we focus on a different kind of contestation, which applies the techniques and even the categories of GA to frame different problems and promote different solutions. We identify three sites of partisan contest that refocus fiscal modelling: including the tax side of the budget equation; comparing the cost of public provision to public subsidies for private programmes; and including the costs of environmental damage. At each site, the future-orientated logic of GA is mobilised to contest the policy implications of austerity. This complicates analysis that financialisation and neoliberalism necessarily 'de-politicise' policy by removing state discretion. Instead, we identify an increasingly important, if technocratic, form of political contestation that offers the possibility to promote more egalitarian responses to population ageing.
Development theory and development in practice : a dialogue
2015 •
Alexander Apostolides
About the Book: This book was made possible by the NGO Support Centre, Cyprus, under the auspices of the EuropeAid project “Knowledge Makes Change” which aimed to develop capacity and raise awareness in Cyprus about the Millennium Development Goals. The project and its effective management by the NGO Support Centre has positively improved communication between academia and NGOs in Cyprus, and has, for the first time, given prominence to the notion of development cooperation in the public arena of Cyprus.
8. The environmental Kuznets curve: a review
2001 •
David Stern
The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis proposes that there is an inverted U-shape relation between various indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita. This has been taken to imply that economic growth will eventually redress the environmental impacts of the early stages of economic development and that growth will lead to further environmental improvements in the developed countries.
10. Natural resource scarcity indicators: an ecological economic synthesis
2001 •
David Stern
In this chapter we review the literature on natural resource scarcity indicators, develop a synthesis based on the ideas of the institutionalist economist John Commons, and a method of decomposing a generalized unit cost indicator into more fundamental determinants of natural resource productivity. This generalized unit cost indicator is compared to alternative indicators using data from the US agricultural sector.
Gross Domestic Problem: The Politics Behind the World's Most Powerful Number
2013 •
Lorenzo Fioramonti
Gross domestic product is arguably the best-known statistic in the contemporary world, and certainly amongst the most powerful. It drives government policy and sets priorities in a variety of vital social fields - from schooling to healthcare. Yet for perhaps the first time since it was invented in the 1930s, this popular icon of economic growth has come to be regarded by a wide range of people as a 'problem'. After all, does our quality of life really improve when our economy grows 2 or 3 per cent? Can we continue to sacrifice the environment to safeguard a vision of the world based on the illusion of infinite economic growth? In Gross Domestic Problem, Lorenzo Fioramonti takes apart the 'content' of GDP - what it measures, what it doesn't and why - and reveals the powerful political interests that have allowed it to dominate today's economies. In doing so, he demonstrates just how little relevance GDP has to moral principles such as equity, social justice and redistribution, and shows that an alternative is possible, as evinced by the 'de-growth' movement and initiatives such as transition towns. A startling insight into the politics of a number that has come to dominate our everyday lives.
