Context Newsroom, 20 September 2024
Olivier De Schutter is U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights & Kate Raworth is senior associate at Oxford University and author of “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist.”
Buried deep in the Pact for the Future – a global declaration to be agreed by heads of state and government meeting at the U.N. in New York this weekend – is a pledge that, if realised, could represent one of the greatest shifts in the way we address global poverty.
Towards the end of the action-packed document, governments “reaffirm the need to urgently develop measures of progress on sustainable development that complement or go beyond GDP”.
This technical and rather dry statement betrays the enormity of what it would mean for the world to measure progress using indicators other than gross domestic product (GDP).
