Israel Replacing GDP with New Indicators of Economic Health

Hi Everyone,

According to this article passed on by Molly Freeman, the Israeli government has committed to 

formulating "a new series of indicators to gauge the quality of life in Israel and the country’s economic situation, instead of relying solely on gross domestic product ‏(GDP‏) figures."

Huzzah! 

(You'll see that you need to register for the site to see the full text of the article - but here are some excerpts for you...)

"...Among the things to be measured are civil and government involvement, employment and the balance between work and leisure, infrastructure and housing, education, personal security, health, personal and societal welfare, and the environmental situation."

“One of the fundamental problems in using GDP as the basis for measuring human progress is the fact that it includes many factors that have a negative influence on society and the environment,” the report stated. “For example, investment in prisons, policing and security, or investment in industrial production that pollutes, contribute to the growth in GDP. There is also importance to measuring investments whose goals are to advance and preserve the quality of life and in measuring activities to strengthen social cohesion,” the report added.  GDP also does not relate to questions of the distribution of wealth and income between individuals, and does not include many activities of households and their contribution to general welfare, said the report.

And, the article goes on:  "Israel is following many other countries who are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, who, in recent years, have adopted a list of measures that complement GDP.  Israel is already involved in the process of adopting new social indexes, as it was the country chosen by the OECD to undertake pioneering research into evaluating the quality of life, based on 11 different indexes determined by the OECD."

Thanks for sharing this amazing news!  We'll have to take a closer look at how many of the indexes are measuring the work of care in households and communities.