Towards an Operational Measurement of Socio-ecological Performance. WWWforEurope Working Paper No. 52
WWWforEurope: Welfare, Wealth and Work for Europe, February 2014, 50 pages
Commissioned by: AK für Wien – Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH – Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research – OeAD-GmbH – European Commission, Framework Programme
Questioning GDP as dominant indicator for economic performance has become commonplace. For economists economic policy always
aims for a broader array of goals (like income, employment, price stability, trade balance) alongside income, with income
being the priority objective. The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission argued for extending and adapting key variables of macroeconomic
analysis. International organisations such as the EC, OECD, Eurostat and UNO have proposed extended arrays of macroeconomic
indicators (see "Beyond GDP", "Compendium of Wellbeing Indicators", "GDP and Beyond", "Green Economy", "Green Growth", "Measuring
Progress of Societies"). Despite these high profile efforts, few wellbeing and environmental variables are in use in macroeconomic
models. The reasons for the low uptake of socio-ecological indicators in macroeconomic models range from path dependencies
in modelling, technical limitations, indicator lists being long and unworkable, choices of indicators appearing ad hoc and
poor data availability. In this paper we review key approaches and identify a limited list of candidate variables and – as
much as possible – offer data sources.