The international community has long acknowledged that Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the main measure of economic progress, ignores human rights and inequality. It fails to account for exploitative practices, unpaid care work, environmental damage, or whether growth benefits are fairly shared and lead to better health, education, social protection, or decent jobs.
Momentum to move beyond GDP as the leading measure of progress has accelerated in recent years, following the Pact for the Future’s mandate to establish a high-level expert group (HLEG) and an intergovernmental process tasked with agreeing on a set of measures of progress on sustainable development that complement and go beyond GDP.
Against this backdrop, UN Human Rights recently hosted the Expert Roundtable on Beyond GDP and Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, bringing together Member States, prominent academics, civil society, statisticians, economists and members of the High-Level Expert Group appointed by the Secretary-General, to explore how human rights indicators can shape metrics beyond GDP.
The event was co-organized with UNCTAD, UNRISD, the UNOG Beyond Lab, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, and it was co-sponsored by Chile, Honduras, Mexico and Spain as well as by the Global Initiative on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (GI-ESCR).
The roundtable took place amid growing interest in the human rights economy, an approach that places human rights at the centre of economic policies and practices, eliminating discrimination, empowering marginalized groups, and reducing inequalities.