How can the national accounts be linked to the objective of obtaining an inclusive measurement of growth, integrating distributional issues and all determining factors of well-being, in both the short and long term? The accounts offer measurements of real income that have undeniable connections with the quantification of current well-being, but they ignore the non-monetary factors of such well-being and they do not allow for evaluation of its sustainability. We present a way of dealing with the first limitation, the notion of equivalent income. It fits well with the accounts approach, it has relatively strong normative justifications and it lends itself well to the micro-macro bridging exercises needed to evaluate inequalities. Creating overall measurements of sustainability seems much more problematic, as it is impossible to do so without projection models that go far beyond the framework of current statistical output.

Citation: Blanchet, D. & Fleurbaey, M. (2020). Building Indicators for Inclusive Growth and its Sustainability: What Can the National Accounts Offer and How Can They Be Supplemented? Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, 517-518-519, 9–24.
https://doi.org/10.24187/ecostat.2020.517t.2020