Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress”: is its proposal already applied?

In 2008, the French President appointed Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi to create a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (CMEPSP). The commission’s final report (2009) outlined a comprehensive framework by defining some guidelines by: • identifying the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress, including measurement problems; • considering what additional information might be required for the production of more relevant social progress indicators; • assessing the feasibility of alternative measurement and presentation tools. The report argues that GDP should not be completely eliminated by the options for measuring progress, but must be integrated with other information. In particular, the Committee defines three major areas in which indicators should be developed: economic conditions, quality of life and sustainability. In the European scene, but not only, there are many initiatives that aim at measuring the progress of countries and well-being through different conceptual frameworks and by using several indicators. This paper intends to analyze some of those relevant initiatives by comparing and confronting them to the Commission’s recommendations, in order to check what already fits the commission recommendations and what still needs to be defined in that perspective. In particular, we compare the Commission’s recommendations with some international and national experiences.