For all the ESCoE Conference 2025 highlights, with reflections in a blog from Paul Schreyer and other overview materials please visit their website page.
In our latest blog, Yente, a regulator in the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR)’s Economy, Business and Trade domain, summarises a panel discussion about ‘beyond GDP’ at the recent ESCoE Conference on Economic Measurement.
At the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) Conference on Economic Measurement, which took place at King’s College London from 21–23 May, OSR’s Director General, Ed Humpherson, chaired the panel session ‘GDP beyond the bottom line: measuring what matters most’. The engaging and thought-provoking panel brought together Diane Coyle (University of Cambridge and ESCoE), Richard Heys (Office for National Statistics) and Chris Giles (Financial Times) to discuss the future of gross domestic product (GDP) and the broader landscape of economic statistics. Each panellist offered their distinct perspective on how we measure economic progress – and what we might be missing.
Richard Heys: Complement, Not Replace
Richard Heys started off by stating that while GDP remains a vital indicator that reflects the ‘supply side’ of the economy quite well, it’s increasingly clear that it doesn’t capture the full picture of economic well-being. He argued for a complementary measure (or measures) to strengthen our understanding of the demand side of the wider range of potential purposes of government spending and guide smarter policy decisions. However, he noted that alternative approaches currently lack the integrated framework that makes GDP so powerful.
Richard pointed to the new UN System of National Accounts (SNA 2025), which aims to address some of GDP’s blind spots, as a pivotal development and further UN work to go further via a new High Level Expert Group. He also highlighted the Office for National Statistics (ONS)’s efforts to create a dashboard of national well-being indicators and acknowledged the complexity involved.
Diane Coyle: GDP Is Falling Short
Diane Coyle offered a more critical view, noting her fading affection for GDP over the past decade. While she acknowledged its utility for monetary policy, she increasingly questioned its ability to reflect the real state of the ‘economy’, especially in light of major changes over the past 20 years, like the digital economy.
Diane pointed to several gaps in what GDP measures that she discusses in her recent book The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters, such as unpaid digital labour, cloud infrastructure and data valuation, and hybrid work and AI-driven productivity.
She contemplated how best to give people and policymakers a sense of how the economy is doing. She praised the ONS’s work on inclusive wealth, which includes a broader range of economic activities and assets than GDP, such as unpaid household services and ecosystem services.
Chris Giles: In Defence of GDP
Chris Giles pushed back against the other panellists’ positions, defending GDP as a robust and meaningful measure. He criticised the overuse of the famous Robert F. Kennedy quote about GDP measuring “everything except that which makes life worthwhile”, arguing that GDP does correlate with key indicators. GDP highly correlates with other indicators of well-being, such as the Human Development Index, and with important non-economic outcomes, such as life expectancy and child mortality, suggesting that increases in GDP had been pivotal in driving improvements in such outcomes.
Chris warned against politicising GDP by embedding environmental or social values directly into it. He argued that GDP’s strength lies in its clarity and neutrality as a monetary measure of what’s produced that allows for debate and interpretation, rather than embedding values into the metric itself.
Audience questions
The panellists engaged in an open and lively discussion, despite their differing viewpoints. The panel also responded to a range of insightful audience questions, which helped to broaden the discussion.
One question focused on whether GDP should be updated to better reflect the digital economy. Chris supported including digital content in GDP, while Diane and Richard highlighted measurement challenges. Richard also reiterated the challenge of making many complementary measures digestible.
The conversation also touched on whether the current debate is driven by low GDP growth. Diane pointed out that concerns about GDP’s limitations have been around for years, while Chris and Richard highlighted broader societal and international efforts to rethink economic measurement.
One audience member challenged Chris’s earlier point about not bringing political values into GDP. They posed that the importance of including environmental measures in GDP isn’t ‘political’ because climate change affects everyone. Chris countered that GDP is not the right mechanism with which to draw attention to climate disasters, and that the news would focus on the environment and climate anyway – probably more so than on GDP.
Final thoughts
It seems that this debate is far from being resolved. The discussion about ‘beyond GDP’ and considering what economic measurement should look like in the 21st century was a key theme of the ESCoE conference, this panel being one of multiple sessions that discussed alternative ways to measure the economy.
Overall, the session was made so engaging and the discussion rich by the diverging viewpoints of the three panellists, who continuously respectfully challenged one another. As Ed pointed out, they could at least agree on one thing: the Robert F. Kennedy quote has got to go.