Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress

Measuring Global Educational Progress

Measuring progress in global health

It is a pleasure to write the editorial for this issue of Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene. This special issue accompanies the now biennial, 3-day meeting of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (RSTMH), which will take place at Oxford Town Hall (St Aldate’s, Oxford, OX1 1BX) from 25–27 September 2014. On assuming office, one of the first presidenti...

Measuring global progress through subjective well-being

Progress could in principle be measured through the change over time of average scores of subjective well-being. However, the existing longitudinal data show little improvement. These survey results are intrinsically insensitive to developments over time, because SWB is typically evaluated relative to proximate, and therefore salient, reference points, such as peers or expectations based on rec...

Measuring progress: A comparison of the GDP, HDI, GS and the RIE

The current paper constructs a progress measurement appropriate for measuring multiple and different dimensions of progress. The paper is not meant to be a detailed discussion of the framework but rather a demonstrated application of the measure. The constructed resource-infrastructure-environment (RIE) progress measure employs a nonmonetary evaluation adopting a weighting technique based on pu...

Measuring Welfare beyond 
 GDP – ‘Objective’ and ‘Subjective’ Indicators in Sweden, 1968–2015

This article analyses a series of negotiations on how to measure welfare and quality of life in Sweden beyond economic indicators. It departs from a 2015 Government Official Report that advanced a strong recommendation to measure only ‘objective indicators’ of quality of life, rather than relying on what is referred to as ‘subjective indicators’ such as life satisfaction and happiness. The asse...