State governments are keenly aware that traditional economic measures do not accurately depict the health and welfare of their communities, nor do they properly guide long-term budgetary and policy decisions. In response, state governments are developing innovative indicators that better measure the well-being of all residents and better capture the progress and sustainability of our society.
One such innovative metric is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). The GPI complements the Gross State Product (GSP) by adding positive values such as household activities, volunteer labor, and education, and subtracting negative costs such as income inequality, crime, loss of leisure time, and environmental degradation from development.
The policy application of the GPI is to gauge whether economic growth effectively improves well-being. As a performance monitoring tool, the indicator can be used to illustrate the impacts of unsustainable GSP activity and to determine how accumulating environmental and social costs can lead to uneconomic growth.
We invite you to explore this to learn more about the GPI and how states are implementing more sustainable practices.