Friends of the Earth has just launched a new interactive website which
looks at new indicators of progress.
Politicians and policy makers are in general agreement that Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) is a poor indicator of progress, being a brute
measure of the size of the economy. Achieving sustainable development
will require much greater scrutiny of the "quality" of economic
activity, and not just measures of its quantity.
We need new indicators of progress. But constructing them is difficult -
as any indicator will be laden with value judgements as to what
constitutes "progress". This new website looks at the most advanced
alternative indicator - the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare
(ISEW). It explains how ISEW is constructed, and then allows users to
change the assumption which underpin the index to create indices of
their own. The results of this are shown - averaged over all users, and
also disaggregated enabling the comparison of the results of business
people with academics, environmentalists with policy makers. In our view
this site shows that the ISEW is agood basis on which to construct
alternative indicators.
We invite you to look at this website, and feed into it the values which
you believe should inform new indicators of progress - through the
interactive part of the site, and also through the site's discussion
group. Your comments and suggestions will help us to build up and show a
picture of the baseline goals and aims for sustainable economic policy.
This website was developed by Friends of the Earth, with the Centre for
Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey and the New Economics
Foundation.
Regards,
Simon Bullock
-- Simon Bullock Sustainable Development Research Unit Friends of the Earth (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) 26-28 Underwood Street, London, N1 7JQ, UK Tel: (+44) 0171 566 1683 Fax: (+44) 0171 490 0881 http://www.foe.co.uk/progress------------------------------------------------------------- Posted to uk-policy, a service of Nexus. http://www.netnexus.org/ Hosting and email provided by new media consultants On-Line Publishing