Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare

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Description

'Friends of the Earth is working with the Centre for Environmental Strategy (CES) , the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and others to put forward alternative economic indicators to GDP.

The most advanced is the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), which has been calculated for 8 countries, and has just been revised in the UK by CES, NEF and Friends of the Earth.

It corrects GDP over a range of issues such as, income inequality, environmental damage, and depletion of environmental assets, to create an indicator which better measures how our economy delivers welfare for people.

Some people argue that the ISEW is too subjective and too susceptible to changes in the assumptions which underpin it.

But the problems in constructing such indicators can and should be overcome.

To answer these arguments, this website shows how the ISEW is constructed, and invites you to change the weightings and assumptions used in the ISEW to create your own ISEW.

In our view, this site shows that the ISEW is a good basis on which to construct alternative indicators." (http://www.foe.co.uk/community/tools/isew/replace.html)