In 1934, Simon Kuznets, who prepared the first official US national income estimates, told Congress that “the welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.” More than ninety years later, GDP is still the number governments watch most closely.
In May 2026, the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP presented its report, Counting What Counts: A Compass of Progress for People and Planet, to the General Assembly. One of us co-chaired the group; the other was its chief editor. Member states must now decide what to do with it.
What GDP captures—and what it leaves out
GDP measures economic production, an important component of material progress. But it was never designed to measure well-being in all its dimensions or the sustainability of that progress. It counts oil-spill cleanups as output and leaves out unpaid care work. It says nothing about security, human rights, health, trust in institutions, or the state of the environment. It does not show who gains and who is left behind, or whether today’s growth erodes the assets future generations will need.
The gap is visible. Through two decades of financial crisis, pandemic, climate change, and new armed conflicts, public dissatisfaction has grown: social unrest, youth protests, rising populism, and declining trust in institutions. What governments measure and what citizens experience have drifted apart.
What the report proposes
The report does not ask countries to abandon GDP. Sustained economic growth remains essential for equitable, inclusive, and sustainable well-being. But growth accompanied by human rights violations, war, stark poverty, or environmental destruction cannot be regarded as genuine progress.
The report proposes a dashboard of 31 indicators in four parts:
- Foundational principles: peace, human rights, and respect for the planet
- Current well-being, in eight domains: material conditions and work, health, education, security, subjective well-being, social cohesion, quality of institutions, and environmental quality
- Equity and inclusion: income, wealth, gender and rural-urban inequalities, and multidimensional deprivation
- Sustainability and resilience: economic, human, institutional, natural, and social capital
A dashboard is transparent, but it cannot say whether a country is doing better overall when its indicators move in different directions. The report, therefore, also recommends exploring the development of a limited number of aggregate indicators in the future. In our view, the dashboard should be complemented by one or two composite measures that are theoretically grounded and empirically robust. One option starts from income and adjusts it for inequality, performance in non-income dimensions such as health, income poverty, and deprivations across non-income dimensions, giving additional weight to shortfalls below poverty and deprivation thresholds (described in a new manuscript).
From report to policy: What needs to happen next
“The next step belongs to Member States,” the Secretary-General said at the launch. Governments should adopt national dashboards adapted to their own priorities and use them in policymaking and budgeting.
Implementation is already beginning. Following an October 21 meeting convened by the UN Conference on Trade and Development, UN Development Programme, and UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, countries have been invited to express interest in piloting the Beyond GDP framework by the end of November 2026. UNDP has also expressed interest in piloting proposals for headline indicators that go beyond the dashboard. Broad country participation will be essential to ensure that the new measures reflect diverse national circumstances and priorities.
Moreover, countries are already taking steps to translate the Beyond GDP agenda into practice. In Mexico, the national statistical office (INEGI) has assessed the feasibility of producing the 31 indicators proposed by the High-Level Expert Group. It identified 19 indicators that are already produced or could be generated with existing statistical capacity, six that require additional processing or institutional coordination, and five that need methodological development or lack a clear production pathway; one indicator is not applicable. INEGI is also estimating the costs of producing the additional indicators. This exercise could serve as a template for other countries to assess their statistical readiness and investment needs. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics tracks 59 measures of national well-being, including seven headline measures, while HM Treasury’s Green Book provides guidance on incorporating well-being impacts into the appraisal of policy proposals, including cost-benefit analysis where feasible.
The UN should produce an annual progress report from 2027. The UN Statistical Commission should develop, validate, and regularly review the new measures. And the media should report progress measures alongside GDP. Implementing this agenda will require strengthening national statistical systems, particularly through financial and technical support for lower-income countries.
GDP will remain an important statistic, but neither income alone nor national averages can capture people’s well-being. Measuring progress requires looking beyond income to the multiple dimensions of well-being, making inequalities visible, and assessing whether improvements can be sustained. The ultimate goal is to ensure that governments use this broader understanding of progress to guide their policies.
The views expressed here are our own and not necessarily those of the other members of the High-Level Expert Group.
