Beyond Growth Worship: indicators of real wealth
Date and venue: Jan 30 2005 (12 am to 3pm) – room I204

Coordination: Laurent Fraisse (Workgroup on Solidarity Socio-Economy, France), Françoise Wautiez (Workgroup on Solidarity Socio-Economy, France).

Speakers: Alex MacGillivray (New Economics Foundation, UK); Bernardo Reyes, (Instituto de Ecologia Politica, Chile); Valérie Michaud, (AlterUqam, Quebec) ;  Ben Quinones, (Asian Pacific Coalition, Philippines/Malaysia ); Jean-Benoît Bourjeois, (France)

Key elements of Alex MacGillivray’s presentation: The need for new national indicators of wealth and well-being

1.	Seminar participants were asked if they felt they would be richer this year than last year.
2.	We discussed whether this was a good enough indicator of progress ?  It is the same as Gross National Income (GNI) for a whole country.  GNI used to be called Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
3.	GNI does not measure health, happiness, women’s work in homes, unpaid work or environmental quality ; nor does it measure problems like crime, pollution, production of weapons and problems from global warming or natural disasters.  The Tsunami would increase economic growth and ‘progress’ in the affected countries.
4.	15 countries have now produced alternative indicators to GNI, including the USA, UK, Sweden, Germany, Italy and developing countries like Thailand, Chile and Bhutan
5.	In every case, real progress is not the same as GNI.
6.	In most countries, the index of sustainable economic welfare (ISEW) departed from GNI as much as 30 years ago. 
7.	In the UK, New Economics Foundation (NEF) has pushed policymakers very hard to adopt a new headline indicator of real progress.  Unfortunately, the government has accepted nearly 150 alternative indicators of sustainable development, and economic growth remains the most powerful.
8.	NEF has also produced a Manifesto for Wellbeing (see http://indicators.socioeco.org/) which gives politicians 10 concrete activities they can do to improve the situation.  
9.	The workshop discussed the importance of understanding that indicators can dictate a model of the world, and that value judgements have to be made specific.
10.	The workshop discussed the importance of developing alternative indicators for countries like Brazil, India and China which are obsessed with economic growth.
11.	Good websites explaining the search for alternative indicators are at : http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/sustainable_development/progress/change  http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/news_mdp.aspx  http://www.rprogress.org/projects/gpi/