Remarks by the President of the General Assembly
H.E. Annalena Baerbock
at the second briefing for Member States on the progress of the High-Level Expert group on Beyond GDP
4 March 2026
Trusteeship Council Chamber
(As Delivered )
Excellencies,
Dear colleagues,
Madam Deputy Secretary-General,
Distinguished Co-Chairs of the expert group who are online, or will be online very soon with us.
The GDP¡ªso Gross Domestic Product¡ªhas served as the dominant measure of economic progress prior even to the founding of the United Nations.
Yet, already, the founder of the modern concept of GDP, Simon Kuznets, cautioned: ¡°the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.¡±
Anyway, the world and its biggest economies continue to use a measure of economic performance based solely on economic output.
Yet, failing to measure the health of our people, the resilience of our societies, and the sustainability of our planet, leads to the cynical situation I would call it, that GDP even tends to increase during crise, natural disasters, and even war.
Because when government spending boosts and industrial activity increases, then also GDP grows, even though no one would ever call this a positive economic situation.
So a healthy measure, or a new measure of prosperity, is long overdue.
Member States recognized this in the Pact for the Future, which, in Action 53, mandated the creation of the High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP, tasked with developing a dashboard of indicators complementing GDP and providing a more comprehensive picture of progress.
Followed by the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development and the Second World Summit for Social Development, the Expert Group has already identified domains of indicators for further discussion including:
- Health and education
- Environmental quality
- Material and subjective wellbeing
- And social capital and governance
These indicators will paint a picture that reflects not merely aggregate economic output but people¡¯s lived daily realities.
The High-Level Expert Group has made significant progress toward this goal.
It has conducted extensive consultations with thousands of stakeholders, including governments, civil society, academia, international financial institutions, and the Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ system.
These diverse inputs formed the basis of its interim report, presented at the World Social Summit, which lays the groundwork for its final recommendations.
And I thank the Member States for your continued support for this agenda, including your active participation in consultations and commitment to launch an intergovernmental process following the presentation of final recommendations.
In this regard, I am pleased to announce that I intend to appoint co-facilitators to oversee this process following the official launch of the report at the end of April.
This is fundamentally a Member State-driven initiative, with the General Assembly at the center.
Its success will depend on your sustained ownership, dialogue, and political leadership¡ªand will serve as an important step in advancing the implementation of the Pact for the Future.
Excellencies,
Colleagues,
Today we face interconnected and compounding crises¡ªfrom climate change to rising inequality to declining trust in institutions.
In this context, how we measure progress determines how we shape our policy responses.
If GDP has long been the speedometer of our economies, the work before us is to design a more complete dashboard of progress ¨C one that tells us not only how fast we are moving, but whether we are moving in the right and in a sustainable direction.
Moving beyond GDP is not about abandoning growth¡ªthe opposite, it is about redefining sustainable growth and progress for the people so that it reflects the wellbeing of our people, the health of our planet, and the stability of our societies.
I look forward to today¡¯s exchange and to your continued engagement as we move toward the next phase of this very important work.
And I thank the Co-Chairs of the Working Group for their incredibly important task ahead.