Abstract

The economic development, welfare, and well-being are among the most important objectives of countries. However, the concepts of “development”, “welfare”, and “well-being” are abstract constructs with no consensus on their content and definition. In this context, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has emerged as a leading and dominant indicator of economic development in the last century. While it is a very valuable measure of material wealth, GDP fails to account for other dimensions of economic development and social welfare such as living conditions, crime, pollution, green areas, inequality, access to health and education, good jobs, and social cohesion. Detailed studies that estimate different well-being indices, such as the Human Development Index or the Genuine Progress Index (GPI), found that there can be significant differences with these indices and the GDP per capita measure. This project argues that new measures should take various dimensions into account. Given that rising inequality levels, environmental issues, social polarization risks, and sustainability problems emerge as an ever-growing risk and challenges for both advanced and developing countries recent years, the need for more comprehensive measures of human development and well-being is very clear. Such efforts do not need to replace GDP, which is still valuable as a measure of material conditions, but they should complement it in other welfare and well-being dimensions.