Global Agenda Council on Benchmarking Progress 2011

Quantifying prosperity and societal progress in a rigorous way is an essential step towards helping governments and civil society prioritize actions and policies. Although economic growth and GDP-based measures are key elements in assessing societies’ well-being, it is ever-clearer that societal progress has social, political and environmental aspects.

Measuring progress should go beyond economic indicators to include social, environmental and governance measures, among others. 

Building on the proposals elaborated for the Global Redesign Initiative, challenges to be addressed going forward include: encouraging the creation of better well-being indicators from official and non-official sources; capturing selected aspects of social, economic, political and environmental progress; promoting the collection of sounder, comparable indicators to foster data-driven policy-making; and designing quality-check mechanisms for official and non-official statistics.