French President Nicolas Sarkozy champions quality-of-life measures
Peter O’Neil, Canwest News Europe Correspondent, Nanaimo Daily News
President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday he will champion a revolutionary way for the world to measure a country’s performance so quality-of-life issues such as the environment, leisure time and health share the same stage with hard economic growth data.
The French president said the current reliance on traditional economic measurements such as gross domestic product (GDP measures the total value of a country’s goods and services) is confusing and misleading, in particular for citizens not participating in a country’s wealth expansion.
“In the whole world, citizens think that we’re lying to them, that the figures are false and, worse, that they’re being manipulated,” Sarkozy said in a speech after unveiling the study done by an international team of economists led by American Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz…
(14 Sept 2009)
Stiglitz Urges End to GDP ‘Fetish’ in Favor of Broader Measures
Mark Deen and David Tweed, Bloomberg
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, urged world leaders to drop an obsession with examining gross domestic product and focus more on broader measures of prosperity.
“GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it increasingly poor one,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris.
The remarks reflect Stiglitz’s study of the issue for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who commissioned a report at the beginning of 2008 after the onset of the financial crisis. Stiglitz and other contributors to the report will present their results tomorrow in Paris at a daylong conference hosted by Sarkozy and attended by Finance Minister Christine Lagarde…
(13 Sept 2009)
How To Make Capitalism Better: Conclusions from the Tomorrow’s Capitalism programme
Tony Dolphin, Senior Economist, Institute for Public Policy Research
This paper summarises the findings of the Tomorrow’s Capitalism programme, organised by ippr in conjunction with Friends Provident Foundation in 2009 with the aim of exploring the future of our financial and economic system.
To do this, we presented a series of debates, seminars and papers featuring leading experts and thinkers from the world of economics, business, politics and the media. The result was a deeper understanding of the flaws inherent in the neo-liberal model of capitalism and the steps needed to correct them, together with a vision of some of the key features of ‘tomorrow’s capitalism’ and the challenges facing policymakers as they seek to improve the current economic and financial model.
A synthesis of this understanding, derived partly from the debates and reports, is provided in this final paper. It does not attempt to cover all the terrain under this vast topic although it does draw some important conclusions.
download full publication (PDF file)
(15 Sept 2009)
Sarkozy and Stiglitz: A New Way to Grow
Rana Foroohar, Newsweek
While Barack Obama was busy yesterday telling Wall Street to shape up, French President Nicolas Sarkozy spent this morning criticizing the entire economic status quo. The key issue in question: how the world tabulates economic growth, or GDP. We’ve always known that the metric was flawed; since GDP is simply a measure of all economic growth, things like natural disasters, traffic jams, and urban violence (all of which put people and money to work even as they wreak havoc) can actually raise a country’s overall GDP. But never has anyone seriously tried to come up with a better way to calculate growth. Until now: at the behest of Sarkozy, a team of superstar economists, headed by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have just unveiled some new ways to tabulate a country’s economic health. See below the dispatch from NEWSWEEK’s Tracy McNicoll, who attended the unveiling of the Stiglitz Report in Paris this morning:
In the magnificent Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne in Paris’s ancient student quarter this morning, Sarkozy spoke to a group of modern economic luminaries and other guests, with backlit marble statues of great scientific philosophers like Descartes and Pascal peering down at him from their perches. He waxed lyrical about the band of experts he’d commissioned 19 months ago to redefine how economic well-being is measured. The result was a 300-page report that blends science and philosophy. Even its authors admit it is meant only to open the debate, not conclude it.
Sarkozy had initially called on the group in February 2008 to tackle the gap between people’s perceptions of their own day-to-day economic well-being and what politicians and statisticians were telling them about the economy. The disconnection between the two has increasingly led to a lack of trust in government and politicians around the world. As Sarkozy put it today, “Nothing is more destructive for democracy.”
(15 Sept 2009)
The report itself – is here
