The Nobel Prize in economics, commissioned in 2008 by the Sarkozy’s government to reflect on the limitations of GDP, estimated in an interview with Agence France-Presse that it is more than ever time to switch to an economy ” more resilient “. When asked about the measures to rely on to ensure a recovery, ” green “, it invites leaders to ” think about the type of economy we want after the pandemic “.
” It should not just go back to where we were. We knew then and we know so much more today that this balance had a lot of inequities and inequalities, ” he says. “What we need to do, is to lead the economy in a direction that reflects all these concerns. The GDP is not a good measure. The GDP does not take into account inequality, lack of resilience, lack of durability. The most important indicator is the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Not only CO2, but also methane. They each have different dimensions, such as their life and their power. In recent years, we have learned more about the multiple manifestations of climate change, for example on how it’s going to affect extreme weather events. What we have learned, it is the complexity of climate change itself, ” says the american economist.
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“I am full of hope, especially in Europe”
The GDP remains the key indicator to evaluate the success of any policy. The evolution towards a new growth model is influenced by the tools we use to measure it ? For Joseph Stiglitz, ” the indicators are important in two respects “. “In our new report [to the OECD], we pointed out that, if we had better measures, we would have had a better idea of the damage that the 2008 crisis was causing. More broadly, we should work on a better measure of the health of the economy, to determine to what extent our stimulus policies actually improve our societies. The emphasis that we put on the GDP did not allow us to realize that the society we have created is not resilient. It did not allow us to calculate the strength of our economy, ” he says.
According to the economist, ” there is a great difference between the fact that a car has a spare wheel or not.” “But in the way we measure GDP, a car without a spare wheel is more efficient than a car with a spare wheel : it costs less. We have created an economy without spare wheel, without hospital beds additional, we do not we are not prepared for the pandemic, we have not done a lot of things that we have allowed it to respond to the pandemic. It is not that we would have been able to prevent it, but we could have an economy much more resilient, more likely to respond, and this, I believe that our statistics do not tell us not. “
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Joseph Stiglitz says it is also “full of hope, especially in Europe,” on the stimulus ” green “. “But we need to continue to work. The world has made the commitment to be carbon neutral by 2050. I think that it is feasible. It is a very positive step, but it is not sufficient to have this aspiration, it is necessary to begin to spend the money. And of course the pandemic encourages us to start spending this money. We need to help people to retrain, lead to other jobs, as a salesman of solar panels. Not to make this transition would have an extremely high cost for the world. We must therefore recognize that some individuals will be worse off. We must absolutely ensure that they are properly protected and to help them to move towards other sectors of production “, concludes the economist.
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