Measuring Global Human Progress: Are We on the Right Track?

As a metric for economic progress, gross domestic product (GDP) has been criticized for hiding the destruction of natural capital and failing to improve happiness/human well-being. Consequently, many studies unanimously argued for a beyond GDP approach, which led to a proliferation of ensuing metrics. However, the proliferation leads to confusion as it complicates matters for policymakers looking to these metrics to inform coherent development objectives and plans. Our article aims to assess theoretical and empirical efforts to measure human progress based on these notions of well-being and sustainability and critically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. We explore systematic trends in indicator activity in the related literature and, in doing so, organize our discussion around the distinct and prominent perspectives that can be identified. We illustrate with a case study on India how divergent matrices, though not beyond comprehension, increase the complexity.