Has the Beyond-GDP Agenda Made its Way into Policy discourses? Evidence from the Legislative Branch in Canada and the United States

Abstract

Since the 1950s, GDP has been the most widely used measure of societal progress for countries around the world. Yet GDP is essentially a measure of current market production and does not capture the wellbeing of households, how growth is distributed, nor the negative effects of growth on the environment and wellbeing of future generations. An expanding literature on the Beyond-GDP agenda has proposed many alternative indicators and measurement systems. Yet, there is little quantitative evidence on whether this agenda is used in policy. This paper assesses the extent to which the Beyond-GDP agenda has made its way into legislative debates in the United States and Canada by estimating word frequency indices of Beyond-GDP keywords overall and by topic (cross-cutting, environmental, social) in the full corpus of legislative debate transcripts during 1996–2023. Keywords were selected based on a literature review and tested through validation exercises. The results show that while Beyond-GDP keywords are increasingly used in legislative debates in both countries, the frequency of usage began at a higher level and rose more in Canada than in the United States. A large language model is also used to assess whether the statements containing selected keywords are consistent with the Beyond-GDP agenda. The results based on a modified index, which incorporates these assessments, are unchanged. Overall, the findings suggest that the Beyond-GDP Agenda has not been uniformly embraced in policy discourses across countries. The relatively low frequency of Beyond-GDP keywords found in the US suggests that the recent call for a renewed political commitment to the Beyond-GDP agenda by the United Nations (2023) is warranted at least in some countries.