Abstract

The UN Secretary-General's Independent High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP, in its 2026 report Counting What Counts: A Compass of Progress for People and Planet, sets fair, inclusive and sustainable well-being as the objective of progress and proposes a dashboard of 22 dimensions and 31 indicators. Two methodological questions are left open: how the dashboard's monetary indicators can be placed on a comparable international basis, and how the core aggregate indicators that the Expert Group recommends but has not yet specified can be constructed. This paper addresses both from the standpoint of value accounting.
First, we show why purchasing power parity (PPP) is the appropriate value scale for the “current well-being” pillar. Household disposable income, the net stock of produced capital and the wealth share of the top 1 per cent appear in national currencies in the dashboard; without a common scale, cross-country differences reflect price-level differences rather than differences in real command over resources. We construct PPP-adjusted measures of material conditions and quantify how country rankings change relative to market-exchange-rate conversion.
Second, we respond to the two illustrative options for a core aggregate indicator proposed in the report — an inequality-adjusted income measure anchored on the global median, and a broader well-being index combining income with health and environmental quality. We specify a PPP-based computation for both and test the sensitivity of country rankings to the choice of benchmark year, the treatment of below-benchmark dimensions and the weighting scheme. We argue that the transparent, modular construction the Expert Group recommends is feasible with existing data.
Third, we extend PPP valuation to the five capital stocks used to measure sustainability and resilience, so that produced, human, social, institutional and natural capital can be expressed on a common basis and compared across countries.
The paper closes with the implications for statistical capacity in developing countries and for the reproducibility of the dashboard.