Abstract

The UN Beyond-GDP report sets out an ambitious data agenda: standardised metadata, at least annual release, disaggregation by geography, age, gender and socio-economic status, and wider use of new data sources under the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics. It also acknowledges that several of its own dimensions — subjective well-being, social cohesion, environmental quality and the five capital accounts — are not yet regularly produced, that many indicators lag by two to four years, and that existing tools for measuring cross-border spillovers cover mainly high-income countries. For most developing countries, implementation capacity rather than conceptual agreement is therefore the binding constraint.
This paper reports on the data architecture behind the WIS measurement system and on what it offers to the UN data agenda, in three parts.
First, indicator selection is constrained by regular production. All 38 third-level indicators are drawn from statistics that international organisations publish annually or biennially, with documented definitions, so that the index can be recomputed by any country without new surveys. We present the source, periodicity and definitional mapping for each indicator and derive an “immediately implementable” subset for countries with limited statistical capacity.
Second, we extend cross-border spillover measurement to low- and middle-income countries. Using existing trade, investment, migration and development-cooperation data, and building on the governance dimension of the WIS framework, we construct spillover indicators that do not depend on donor-reporting systems designed for high-income countries. This responds directly to a gap the report itself identifies.
Third, we set out data governance and quality assurance protocols: reconciliation of overlapping sources, treatment of revisions and missing values, disaggregation requirements, and transparency conditions for reproducible national dashboards.
The paper argues that a benchmark intended for universal application needs a documented low-cost implementation path, and provides one.