Gross domestic product encompasses the monetary value of all the goods and services that have attained completion, produced within the borders of a certain country and additionally should be within a defined timeline. The elements that make GDP distinctive is the fact that it encompasses all the public as well as private consumption, investments, government outlays as well as the exports, ignoring the imports that are occurring with the defined territory. In a nutshell, GPP presents a broad assessment of a country’s general economic activity (Higgs, 2015).
The HDI is a tool that the UN developed to assist in the assessment and consequently rank the levels of social as well as economic development in different countries through the application of the four set criteria. These include life expectancy at birth, the average years of schooling, and the expected number of schooling years as well as the gross national income per capita. Through the HDI, it is possible to track the variations in development levels over a certain course of time and additionally to offer comparison for the developments that are occurring in different countries. The creation of the HDI was meant to serve the objective of emphasizing that people along with their abilities need to be the decisive criteria for the assessment of the developments that are taking place in a country and not just the economic growth (Darvishan & Hakimzadeh, 2015). HDI are also applicable to the assessment of the national policy choices by asking the manner in which two countries that have a similar level of GNI per capita are ending up with dissimilar human development outcomes. These dissimilarities are applied in developing debates on the policy priorities by a government.
Inclusive wealth entails a monetary measure that is made if the summation of the natural, physical as well as the human assets. The natural capital encompasses the forests, land, fossil fuels as well as the minerals. The human capital is in reference to the population’s skills and education. The physical which represents the manufactured products encompass things as buildings, machinery as well as infrastructure. The reference point of the IWR is the fact that the productive base of a nation is dependent on the human capital, manufactured capital as well as the natural capital (Polasky, et al., 2015). The assessment of the human along with the natural produced capital that encompass the components of inclusive wealth provide a broader as well as a more comprehensive assessment of the performance of a country’s economy. Through the reliance on IWR as the economic measurement tool, countries will enjoy an innovative yardstick that will be offering them a new perspective relating to their economic performance in the recent decades. The measurement is better that the traditionally applied GDP in offering a reflection of the sustainable development of nations.
There are various attribute that make GDP a poor measure of a country’s economic progress. These challenges demerits include: GDP does not take into account the measurements of the quality of life in country. The quality is applied in the evaluation of the general wellbeing of individuals as well as societies in that it is wrong to confuse the quality of live with standards of living which relies on the primary income. Quality of life entails employment, wealth, physical as well as mental health and education among others Higgs, 2015). The fact that GDP fails to take the quality of life into consideration during its measurements makes it s limited measure of a nation’s progress. GDP ignores the impact that the informal markets have on an economy. It fails to address the activities of the black market where the money that is spent does not get regulated. The failure to comprehensively address the informal markets thus makes GDP a limited measure of economic progress of a nation. The fact that GDP has the tendency of overestimating the negative externalities which are the bad effects that third parties suffer following the production or consumption of a good or service makes it poor measures of economic progress. Whenever there is an increase in the GDP, there is also a concurrent increase in the adversarial externalities such as water and air pollution (Higgs, 2015). As GDP overestimates the negative externalities, it consequently limits it as a criteria for examining the welfare that between different countries.
Another measure that applies to assessing the progress of a nation is the genuine progress indicator (GPI). The advantages that come with GPI is the fact that it assists the policy makers to assess the well their citizen are doing both socially and economically (Hayashi, 2015). Human development index as an additional measure assesses the progress of a nation in three dimensions of human development. These include a healthy and long life attributed to the life expectancy at birth, knowledge attributed to the school enrollment rates and literacy levels as well as decent living standards seen via the GDP per capita. The ecological footprint as the additional measure assesses quantity of land as well as waters area that a human populations needs to be able to produce the resources they consume as well as to absorb its water via the available technologies.