To Measure and to Narrate: Paths Toward a Sustainable Future

ABSTRACT

This contribution engages with the question of measurement of economic well-being from a feminist ecological perspective. It starts from the dual premises that it is necessary to recognize and value as important the economic, social, and environmental contributors to economic welfare and desirable for ecological and feminist economists to collaborate in moving toward a sustainable future. The study examines the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), formulated and developed by environmental-ecological economists, as a potentially useful measure that responds to both feminist and ecological economic concerns by making visible unpaid care labor and the environment. As an accounting framework that applies the monetary imputation approach, the GPI is objectionable to some ecological and feminist economists. Reviewing debates among feminist and ecological economists, this study argues that the goals and potential objections of both groups may be addressed by complementing GPI with a narrative approach in a plural and conditional policy-input process.

KEYWORDS:

• Genuine Progress Indicator
• unpaid care work
• sustainability
• ecology
• welfare measures

JEL:

• Q57
• B54

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Bernardo Aguilar-González, Corinna Dengler, participants of the Berlin workshop, Lisa Cook, Joyce Jacobsen, and three anonymous reviewers for useful comments. I am grateful to Clair Brown for comments on the paper, and to Beth Blattenberger, John Talberth, Hande Togrul, the Utah Population and Environment (UPEC) group, and members of the GPI Next Generation online forum for discussions. The guest editors have been generous with their suggestions and patience. Special thanks are due to Julie Nelson. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors and omissions.

Notes

1 Mark Anielski (2001: 12) reminds us that “[i]f what gets measured gets our attention, what we value must ultimately drive what we choose to measure and manage.” This view is consistent with feminist critiques that women's contributions, and what we most deeply value historically, have been neglected and unmeasured in dominant discourses or social well-being assessment projects. Similarly, Nancy Folbre (2002: 79) urges us “to improve our measures of the kinds of success we care about. Otherwise, we will not be able to reward the kinds of behavior we most value,” while Margunn Bjørnholt and Ailsa McKay (2013: 15) call for “a rethink about what counts.” They ask: “What do we value and perhaps more importantly what do we not value in the context of evaluating the performance of any economy?” (15). In the same spirit, Clair Brown states, “[h]ow we measure economic performance reflects our values and guides us in how we live” (2017: 103).

2 The eleven dimensions include three “material” conditions (income and wealth, jobs and earnings, and housing) and eight “quality of life” dimensions (health status, work–life balance, education and skills, social connections, civic engagement and governance, environmental quality, personal security, and subjective well-being [Cantril Ladder]). Several of the twenty-four indicators used to gauge these eleven dimensions are also subjective measures, based on survey of people's perceptions of, for example, the quality of their water, own health status, or their social network support.

3 Despite considerable effort and expense to develop and maintain it, as indicated by OECD (2017), the Better Life dashboard cannot be used to generate an overall index due to methodological problems. Currently, the OECD's interactive website only allows each user to generate a Better Life Index, based on the user's own valuation of the eleven dimensions.

4 As feminist economists have critiqued, use of a low-skilled replacement cost is an anti-female and anti-care work choice in valuation of household labor. The latest GPI studies use the opportunity cost (average wage) approach to valuation, and input from feminist economists can only make this approach the standard.

5 Among low- and middle-income countries, ISEW/GPI has been estimated for Chile (Castañeda 1999), China (Wen, Yang, and Lawn 2008), Brazil (Andrade and Ruiz Garcia 2015), India (Lawn 2008), and Thailand (Clarke and Islam 2005).

6 In Hawaii and Colorado, the GPI is estimated by state agencies; Maryland and Vermont adopted the GPI as a well-being indicator and are committed to maintaining and updating it.

7 Anielski (2001) developed a prototype GPI balance sheet for capital stocks (assets and liabilities) as well as estimating a GPI net income statement for Alberta, Canada.

8 EF measures the per capita amount of land needed to maintain a country's consumption level over time. EF expresses the ecological impact of human economic activity in terms of the physical area required to provide the resources humans use and to absorb the waste in a year, at the given technological level. Expressed in per capita terms, for an economy to be sustainable, EF has to be less than biocapacity, the land area available to provide these services.

9 Similar results on the divergence of trends also hold in happiness studies, that beyond a certain threshold increases in income do not enhance self-reported happiness (Easterlin 1995; Layard 2005; Easterlin et al. 2010). Thus, the results of pairing GDP per capita with happiness level and the GDP per capita with GPI per capita are broadly consistent.

10 In addition, there have been non-feminist critics of the theoretical soundness and desirability of the Accounting Project (See ch. 5 in Benería, Berik, and Floro [2015]).

11 Waring also criticizes the top-down nature of various indicators put forth by international agencies, where the choice of indicators is often based on expediency, data availability or the “UN Agenda of the year” (2003: 40). While the top-down approach also characterizes formulation of HDI, ISEW, and Nova Scotia GPI, Waring does not raise this critique in her evaluation of these indicators.

12 The Alberta GPI reports trends in raw data (each component measured in its own units, for example, volunteer hours per person per year, wetland area remaining in square kilometers, or greenhouse gas emissions in tons) and in indexed (normalized) form, and it reports the monetary trends for the subset of standard GPI components along with the single-value GPI.

13 Waring’s (2003) own examples suggest these potential problems. She points out that divorce can be viewed as having a negative social cost in some communities as it leads to decline in the economic well-being of women, but it could also be seen as positive in other contexts. Similarly, she notes that the rate of oil extraction could be a cost (in terms of intergenerational equity) or a positive contribution to well-being.

14 The index approach transforms variables in different units to the same scale (0 to 100) and benchmarks the trend in each component relative to its best value (either the lowest or the highest value) during the period under consideration.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Günseli Berik

Günseli Berik is Professor of Economics at the University of Utah, where she teaches development economics and feminist economics. Her recent research is on feminist debates on labor standards in export-oriented production and GPI as a measure of economic welfare. She collaborated with Erica Gaddis in the Utah GPI study, which was published in 2011.