Two landmark UN reports make the case for replacing the world’s dominant economic measure with something that actually captures human welfare.

Gross domestic product was never designed to measure human wellbeing. It counts economic activity: transactions, output, the flow of money. It does not ask whether children have access to decent schools, whether people can see a doctor when they are ill, or whether the institutions that govern them can be held to account. Yet GDP has become the dominant lens through which governments, credit agencies and international institutions assess national progress, with consequences that shape everything from borrowing costs to budget priorities. When the metric is narrow, the decisions it drives tend to be narrow too.

Two recent United Nations reports suggest that the grip of GDP may at last be loosening. A report released this month by an expert group appointed by the UN Secretary-General proposes a dashboard of 31 alternative indicators for measuring economic progress. Many bear directly on human rights: health and education outcomes, the prevalence of discrimination and intimate partner violence, poverty, inequality, labour rights, environmental sustainability and public trust in institutions. The report also recommends the development of a single headline indicator that aggregates multiple dimensions, offering a counterweight to GDP’s outsized influence on economic decision-making. Human Rights Watch, which has advocated for precisely this kind of framework for several years, welcomed the proposals.

Beyond growth

The second report, launched on 21 April by Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, offers a roadmap for fulfilling economic, social and cultural rights without depending on growth alone to do the work. It sets out evidence-based policies including adequate funding for public services, universal social protection, the upholding of labour rights and the adoption of indicators that go beyond GDP. Together the two documents represent the most concrete attempt yet within the UN system to translate a long-running intellectual critique of growth-centred economics into practical policy recommendations.

The critique itself is not new. Economists and development theorists have argued for decades that GDP is an unreliable predictor of economic resilience and vulnerability, and that societies can record strong headline growth while leaving large portions of their populations without healthcare, decent work or protection from discrimination. What has been missing is institutional momentum to translate that critique into alternative frameworks with the weight to shift government behaviour.

From recommendation to reality

The harder question is whether governments and international institutions will adopt and integrate these indicators in ways that genuinely change incentives. GDP weighs heavily on credit ratings and borrowing costs precisely because it is universally recognised and consistently measured. A rival indicator earns comparable authority only if comparable institutions use it consistently, a political and technical challenge that the reports acknowledge but cannot themselves resolve.

What the reports do demonstrate is that the UN is capable of using its convening authority to push against something as deeply entrenched as the global fixation on GDP. The expert group’s dashboard and the special rapporteur’s roadmap together provide governments with both the conceptual framework and the policy toolkit to move in a different direction. Whether they choose to do so is another matter entirely.

Sources: UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP; UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Olivier de Schutter; Human Rights Watch; UNCTAD; April and May 2026.