Healthy, safe and getting along with each other: Australia attempts to look beyond GDP to measure what matters

Too often economists reduce important issues, like prosperity, to a narrow set of indicators such as gross domestic product to measure national progress.

Anything that boosts GDP is good, right?

Well, no, of course not. Growing the size of the economy while wrecking the environment or making people miserable is no step forward.

So a number of countries around the world – including the UK, Canada and New Zealand – have introduced alternative ways to measure wellbeing that goes “beyond GDP”.

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Treasury, under the direction of Jim Chalmers, established the “Measuring What Matters” framework in 2023 to track our progress towards “a more healthy, secure, sustainable, cohesive and prosperous Australia”.

Here’s a selection from each theme as laid out in the A