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The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) has been proposed as an alternative to a country’s Gross National Product (GNP) or Gross...

The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare is calculated as follows:personal consumption + public non-defensive expenditures - private defensive expenditures + capital formation + services from domestic labour - costs of environmental degradation - depreciation of natural capitalIt is no longer reported at the official website of the organization who devised it (called the Friends of the Earth, linked below), but using World Bank World Development Indicators I was able to get some approximately...

The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare is calculated as follows:
personal consumption
+ public non-defensive expenditures
- private defensive expenditures
+ capital formation
+ services from domestic labour
- costs of environmental degradation
- depreciation of natural capital

It is no longer reported at the official website of the organization who devised it (called the Friends of the Earth, linked below), but using World Bank World Development Indicators I was able to get some approximately analogous figures. Actually doing it for all countries would be a substantial undertaking (you could probably publish a paper on it), but I did it for the United States as a demonstration.

The results are not actually as striking as one might imagine; the sense a lot of people have that our economic growth is unsustainable does not appear to be borne out, at least if the World Bank figures on environmentally-adjusted saving are accurate. In fact, the overall annualized growth rates I find for this estimated ISEW and standard GDP for the period 1990 to 2014 are almost identical: 2.46% and 2.47%. Indeed, perhaps most surprisingly, the slightly higher figure is for ISEW---sustainability has improved just slightly faster than overall economic output!

That might not happen for all countries, but it did for the US.

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