Measuring Welfare Beyond Economics: The Genuine Progress Of Hong Kong And Singapore (Routledge Studies In Sustainable Development) - 9780415813839

Developed in the 1930s, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was never meant to be an indicator of the level of welfare of a population, but its emphasis by politicians and news outlets has made it become one of the most popular indicators of "development". Increasingly scholars have criticized the emphasis on the GDP, and put forward other indicators, amongst which is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), an aggregate index of over 20 economic, social and environmental indicators, which are added or subtracted depending on whether they are considered as contributing to, or subtracting from, people's welfare or well-being. The most interesting and useful research related to the GPI consists in its comparison to the GDP. This is the first book to calculate the GPI of Hong Kong and Singapore from 1968 to 2011. The book explores how in most other countries the GDP has increased faster than the GPI, with the GPI stabilizing during the 1970s or 1980s because the social and environmental costs of development associated with rapid economic growth slowed down "genuine progress", as measured by the GPI. This has been explained with the "threshold hypothesis", which states that once a certain level of development of a country is reached, the GPI no longer increases, even if the economy (as measured by the GDP) grows. Yet in Hong Kong and Singapore the GPI only stabilized in 1998. The book examines this in light of the deindustrialization of Hong Kong and Singapore, the Asian Economic Crisis, and the continued investment in infrastructure. The book also discusses the policy implications of a slowdown of the GPI, in terms of promoting a "steady state economy" where economic growth is no longer the goal of government policies.

• | Author: Claudio O. Delang, Yi Hang Yu
• | Publisher: Routledge
• | Publication Date: Jul 10, 2015
• | Number of Pages: 194 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0415813832
• | ISBN-13: 9780415813839