IISD Events 256d ago

As the push intensifies for countries to go "beyond GDP" when measuring progress, IISD and partners launched an e-course designed for post-secondary students and policymakers to explore the alternatives to GDP. The limitations of GDP as a metric of prosperity and economic success are well documented. It fails to measure the environmental impacts of economic activity. It is unable to measure work and labour that isn’t conducted through a market transaction. It prioritizes questions of income and expenditure over those of well-being. In this webinar, speakers touch on the benefits and shortcomings of GDP, its current uses, and what a world "beyond GDP" predominance might look like. The webinar also launched a new learning tool. IISD has developed an e-course that presents different measures for assessing national progress, which address sustainability concerns better than GDP does. The e-course is designed in four modules, giving an introduction to the limitations of GDP, an overview of alternative and complementary measures to GDP, and an in-depth dive into the Comprehensive Wealth Index components and their policy implications. It is a self-paced course that takes about 4 hours to complete, and guides learners through this content with interactive questions and scenarios.