The Portuguese Prime Minister, António Costa, submitted to the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, the social partners’ report presenting their visions on how to develop indicators to complement GDP and better understand citizens’ “well-being”, on Friday 7 May at the closing ceremony of the High Conference of the Social Summit in Porto.
This report was requested by Charles Michel at the autumn 2020 tripartite social summit (see EUROPE 12714/1, 12582/25). He welcomed the social partners’ proposal, stressing that GDP, which has been used “for decades” to monitor the development of societies, “is not sufficient to show the level of development of a society”. For him, the social partners’ document can constitute a “compass” for the European project, “a compass anchored in well-being”.
In their document, the social partners (ETUC, BusinessEurope, SGI Europe, SMEunited) state that they do not want to create a single “composite” indicator, but rather a broader “social scoreboard” to go “beyond GDP”.
This concept would be structured around three pillars: social, economic and environmental. Among the social indicators, the social partners propose to monitor the employment rate, protection against crime, the level of corruption in public institutions, and the quality of social security.
More specifically, to better understand the social dimension, they suggest taking into account: - the GINI index, which measures inequality; - an indicator measuring the number of NEETs (young people under 25 years of age who are not in work, education or training); - another measuring years of healthy life; - an indicator measuring collective bargaining coverage.
On the economic side, the social partners propose to measure the “quality of growth” by taking into account the rate of corruption, the dynamism or sluggishness of the labour market, and the quality of public services related to material living conditions, health care and education.
For public services, the social partners suggest taking into account their accessibility, availability, and performance. Furthermore, they consider it necessary to measure productivity in order to understand the sustainability of economic growth. In addition, employers and trade unions want to take better account of regional disparities and regional GNI convergence.
For example, on the economic side, they propose to measure adult participation in training (one of the three main objectives for 2030 of the Social Summit Action Plan - see EUROPE 12671/2) or total net investment in non-financial assets.
The social partners also suggest the inclusion of environmental indicators to better measure the effects of growth “in terms of costs and benefits”. For this purpose, they propose to measure the share of renewable energy in electricity production, greenhouse gas emissions, air pollutants, and biological diversity. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)