This proposal aims to replace GDP-centric policy frameworks and realign decision-making with social and ecological outcomes. GDP is one part of a broader accounting framework called the System of National Accounts that analyses core economic concepts such as productivity, consumption, savings, imports, exports, and financial flows. Contemporary economic governance remains anchored in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the System of National Accounts (SNA), which together shape how governments diagnose problems, design policy, and evaluate progress. While GDP is widely recognised as an inadequate measure of societal wellbeing, its institutional dominance persists because it is embedded within this powerful global accounting and modelling infrastructure that provides harmonised data, supports macroeconomic analysis, and guides policymaking across over 200 countries. As a result, policy attention remains narrowly focused on economic output, obscuring trade-offs with inequality, environmental degradation, and long-term sustainability. Existing “beyond-GDP” indicators have failed to displace this paradigm because they lack the same level of institutionalization and policy functionality. In response, this proposal advances the development of a global accounting framework for sustainable and inclusive wellbeing that integrates economic, social, and environmental systems into a single, policy-relevant architecture. This proposal remains in alignment with the report of the High Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP appointed by the UN Secretary General which asked that the SNA accounting framework be revisited. Building on existing statistical infrastructures such as the SNA, the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), and emerging social accounting systems, governments should develop integrated “wellbeing accounts” that measure not only economic flows but also distributional outcomes, ecological limits, and long-term sustainability across multiple units such as mass, people, time. These accounts should be produced regularly by national statistical offices and coordinated globally through the United Nations to ensure comparability across the globe. Importantly, the framework should be linked to new generations of post-growth macroeconomic models that are capable of analysing trade-offs, synergies, and transboundary impacts, including consumption-based footprints. By replacing GDP and the traditional System of National Accounts as the central organising metrics and embedding wellbeing, inclusion, and sustainability into core economic accounting, this policy would reorient governance toward long-term, equitable, and ecologically grounded development pathways.
