A Round Table Expert Group brought together by the Carnegie UK Trust, has published its report “More than GDP: Measuring What Matters”, on taking forward the way the Scottish Government measures progress through its National Performance Framework.  Drawing on international work, the Round Table argues that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fails to reflect factors that are just as important as economic output such as life expectancy, wellbeing, levels of inequality, environment damage and loss of natural resources.  The group says that the Government, in its second term, has the opportunity to use the wider array of information gathered in its National Performance Framework to both communicate what matters to the people of Scotland but also to be held to account by the Parliament. Recommendations include:

Recommendation 1: Focusing on delivering economic growth as the end rather than the means is inadequate. Our collective purpose should be improving people’s well-being, so the time is right for Scotland to shift its emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.

Recommendation 8: Civil Society organisations should lead a national debate about what really matters for Scotland. This debate should feed into decisions by future Scottish governments on the long-term goal or goals for Scotland and how to measure progress towards the goal(s).

One of the initial sources of impetus for this work is acknowledged as being CDAS’ 2009 conference ‘Measuring What Matters’