Going beyond GDP with a parsimonious indicator: inequality-adjusted healthy lifetime income

Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does notcapture many dimensions that imply a “good life”, such as health and equality ofopportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of being easy to interpret andto calculate with manageable data requirements. Against this backdrop, there is aneed for a measure of well-being that preserves the advantages of per capita GDP,but also includes health and equality. We propose a new parsimonious indicatorto fill this gap, and calculate it for 149 countries. This new indicator could beparticularly useful in complementing standard well-being indicators during theCOVID-19 pandemic. This is because (i) COVID-19 predominantly affects olderadults beyond their prime working ages whose mortality and morbidity do notstrongly affect GDP, and (ii) COVID-19 is known to have large effects on inequalityin many countries.

Why Not Replace GDP?

This is a comment on Katharina Lima de Miranda and Dennis Snower’s multidimensional approach for the assessment of human well-being. It applauds the authors for looking “beyond GDP” but urges them to go one step further and replace GDP as a measure of material well-being by growth national income and actual individual consumption. Unlike GDP, these alternative measures for material well-being can be used to single out activities by multinational entities that are largely unrelated to domestic well-being. I will show that multinational entity activities, like the relocation of corporate headquarters and IP assets to Ireland and Luxembourg, have grown in such a substantial way in recent years that they can bias assessments of both material and human well-being.