Beyond GDP Without Wealth Accounting

Wealth vs Income: The Fight Over How We Measure Progress

The new report of the UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP, produced within the framework of the post-2030 agenda, marks a step forward in the long struggle to move beyond “the little big number”.

Counting What Counts

During consultations, UN Member States made one point very clear: whatever comes “Beyond GDP” must be statistically feasible for all countries, country-owned, and build upon the Sustainable Development Goals .

That settled the question of whether GDP should be complemented. The real debate is over what should replace its dominance, and how.

In April 2026, a coalition of scientists, economists, and statisticians submitted an “alternative proposal” to the UN Secretary-General. Their argument was straightforward: the most robust, concise, and policy-relevant complement to GDP is wealth accounting. Yet the HLEG report gives this only brief attention, mentioning comprehensive wealth accounting largely in passing rather than treating it as a central organising principle.

As the UN moves toward an intergovernmental process to operationalize these methodologies at the country level, the window to shape the future of macroeconomic measurement is wide open.

So what is the solution?

Claiming to have the solution would be a bit arrogant. But in many ways the solution has been growing since the beginning of national accounting.

The first step is to identify the core problem: GDP is a flow measure of current economic activity. It tells us what is being produced today, but says very little about whether than production is sustainable tomorrow. Most importantly, it abstracts from the depletion of natural capital.

As Partha Dasgupta and Simon Levin have argued, evaluating an economy’s long-run prospects requires looking at stocks, not just flows.

An economy’s true wealth is the social value of entire asset base:

• Produced Capital: Machinery, buildings, infrastructure.

• Human Capital: Health, education, and aptitudes.

• Natural Capital: Ecosystems, forests, and sub-soil resources.

Figure 1 illustrates this relationship: produced, human, and natural capital form the foundation of inclusive wealth, while GDP captures only part of the picture. Well-being depends not just on market output, but also on life-support systems, amenity values, and environmental externalities that GDP often ignores.

Figure 1: A schema of the economy-environmental system (from McLaughlin 2026)

At the centre of this framework sits a measure that has existed for more than thirty years: Genuine Savings (GS).

Genuine Savings (GS) captures the change in comprehensive wealth. If GS is positive, society is expanding its future capabilities. If GS is negative, development is fundamentally unsustainable: the economy is boosting today’s GDP by liquidating its its natural inheritance.

This is not a theoretical problem. It is visible across history as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Genuine Savings per capita in the 20th century

Figure 3 shows the relationship between Genuine Savings per capita and the Human Development index across selected periods (from McLaughlin, Ducoing, and Oxley 2025). The relationship is clear: sustained improvements in human development require positive wealth accumulation.

Figure 3: Correlation between Genuine Savings per capita and HDI, selected periods. Source: McLaughlin, Ducoing and Oxley (2025).

To make wealth accounting a central pillar of the Beyond GDP framework, a coalition of experts has laid out a four-step actionable plan:

1. Standardise: Converge on internationally agreed concepts for national wealth accounting, including how to value pollution and ecosystem assets. This will help to avoid the detected problems in wealth-based sustainability metrics

2. Establish a Wealth Institute: Create a dedicated, funded organization, either stand-alone or within a multilateral institution like the UNDP, tasked with compiling and reporting annual wealth accounts for all nations.

3. Annual Reporting: Publish a flagship annual report tracking the change in wealth over time as the primary indicator of sustainability, supplemented by planetary boundary indicators.

4. Capacity Building: Train national statisticians and decision-makers so that governments can eventually take over and own their wealth accounting processes.

But how do we bridge the gap between theory and immediate implementation?

While wealth accounting scales up globally, policymakers need a practical dashboard now.

The most useful solution is to pair Genuine Savings with a broad measure of present well-being, such as Leandro Prados de la Escosura’s Augmented Human Development Index (AHDI).

This creates a powerful dual metric.

• AHDI measures the current state of human well-being, incorporating vital dimensions like political and civil rights across long historical periods.

• Genuine Savings provides the sustainability test. It asks the essential question: are we achieving today’s high human development by degrading the asset base that future generations depend on?

History makes this visible.

The resource curse offers one example. Several resource-rich Latin American economies, such as Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, achieved periods of strong GDP growth through intensive extraction of natural wealth, but often failed to reinvest those rents into human or produced capital. Persistent negative GS reveals that much of this growth was structurally unsustainable.

The industrial transition offers another lesson. Successful development often involves moving from resource depletion toward positive Genuine Savings through large investments in education, infrastructure, and institutional capacity. Technological progress also plays a major role in offsetting environmental depreciation and sustaining long-term wealth accumulation.

The conclusion is straightforward. GDP does not need to be discarded. But it must be dethroned as the sole measure of progress. The UN’s upcoming intergovernmental process offers a rare opportunity to do exactly that.

By establishing a Global Wealth Institute and adopting a simple dashboard built around AHDI and Genuine Savings, we can finally measure both how well we are living today, and whether we are leaving enough wealth for tomorrow.