WTF is a wellbeing budget

May 3, 2019

Arthur Grimes discusses the upcoming wellbeing budget on the Two Cents Worth podcast from RNZ and Newsroom. 

There are two fundamental problems with GDP. Firstly, it overlooks unpaid work like parenting and the work of unpaid carers and this can lead to bad policy that pushes people into work. Secondly, GDP counts all expenditure, but not necessarily the context. For example, if a country had an oil spill and then spent a fortune cleaning it up, GDP would go up so look positive but that obviously doesn't take into account negative impact of the pollution issue.