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ARTICLE · 15 APRIL 2014

Deloitte Monday Briefing: Measuring Social Progress

Gross Domestic Product has been the yardstick measure of economic performance since it was formalised by the US economist Simon Kuznets 80 years ago.

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  • Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been the yardstick measure of economic performance since it was formalised by the US economist Simon Kuznets 80 years ago. Yet, even on the day of its launch Kuznets warned that the "welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income". GDP does not tell the full story.
  • Last week Deloitte in London hosted the launch of a new measure of welfare designed to complement GDP. The Social Progress Index (SPI), the brain-child of a team headed by Professor Michael Porter of Harvard University, assesses 132 countries on a basket of 54 social and environmental indicators. Each country is provided with a score and rank.
  • The top rank of the SPI is dominated by relatively small, advanced Western nations. New Zealand tops the ranking, followed by Switzerland and Iceland. The UK is ranked at 13th in the world, ahead of Japan (14th) and the US (16th), but behind Germany (12th) and Canada (7th).

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