A policy analysis of Victoria's Genuine Progress Indictor

Measuring sustainable well-being is an important task in determining whether people's lives are improving or becoming worse over time. A new index, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), has been developed in order to measure sustainable well-being. The GPI is comprised of a large number of individual cost and benefit items that account for various social, environmental and economic impacts associated with a growing economy. Various policy implications flow from the result of applying this new well-being metric. This paper briefly reviews an application of the GPI to the state of Victoria, Australia for the period 1986–2003, before discussing the policy implications of this application.