In Spring 2010, the Utah Population and Environment Coalition plans to release to the public a report regarding Utah Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI).  The GPI is an alternative to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that seeks to measure the economic well-being of society.
 

The shortcomings of GDP in measuring wellbeing are well-known. The GDP is a tally of all the monetary transactions that have taken place in the sale of final goods and services in a given year. As such, it does not take into account the level of income inequality and the non-monetary activities that contribute to our well-being, it does not differentiate between the quality of our spending (i.e. whether or not they are a net addition to our well-being), and it does not account for the depletion of natural resources in the course of production of goods and services. These and other weaknesses of GDP have been a source of criticism since the late 1960s and have fueled a search for alternative measures. The shortcomings of GDP are detailed in a recent report by the international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Performance headed by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University (http://stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/en/index.htm).  

GPI seeks to address these shortcomings by taking personal consumption level as its starting point and adjusting it for income distribution; adding the value of housework, volunteer work, higher education; deducting a host of costs, such as the cost of crime, commuting, lost leisure time, pollution, the loss of natural resource function (wetlands, farmland, forests). When this methodology is applied to the U.S., the real GPI is found to have grown more slowly over the 1950 – 2004 period compared to the growth in real GDP, both overall and in per capita terms. Per capita real GPI is stagnant, particularly after 1980, suggesting that the additional expenditures and costs of economic growth are offsetting the additional benefits associated with increased personal consumption, nonmarket work and capital services.  Please be sure to take a look at:  Redefining Progress, Genuine Progress Indicator 2006, (http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm)

The Utah GPI study is applying this methodology to state level data for 1990-2007.

Please click here to download an Acrobat file of our plan presentation.