How to measure progress towards quality and sustainability of life?

Abstract

The vagueness of the concept of 'sustainable development' ceased to serve as a consensus platform and instead became a source of controversy. Therefore an instrument is needed to measure whether we are striving towards sustainable development or not. Today the most widely used indicator of economic prosperity is gross domestic product (GDP). It is often incorrectly interpreted as an indicator of quality of life. If, however, GDP is considered to be quality-of-life indicator, it is a misleading indicator as GDP does not cover the services people conduct outside the official market. As a result, environmentalists together with economists have long been cooperating in designing an alternative indicator capable of better capturing the development of society. Even though GDP is good for measuring economic performance, it is highly misleading as an indicator of the quality and sustainability of life. This article describes briefly the most relevant alternative indicators to GDP developed during last two decades including Czech and Slovak methodology of the Quality and Sustainability of Life Index.