Seminar: "Measuring economic welfare beyond GDP", by Dr Laura Malinauskaitė

Dr Laura Malinauskaitė, post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Iceland, will be visiting ICTA-UAB to give a seminar on the alternative measures of welfare.

Title: "Measuring economic welfare beyond GDP: the Genuine Progress Indicator, its development, and applications"

Speaker: Dr Laura Malinauskaitė, Faculty of Economics, University of Iceland.

• Date: Wednesday, October 14th, 2026
• Time: From 11 a 12h
• Venue: Room Z/033 and Online https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/365768503890728?p=sjTinbHVOyfoilJCPH

GDP remains the dominant measure of progress and economic welfare, yet it captures neither how the gains of growth are shared nor the social and environmental costs associated with them. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and its predeccessor Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) are monetary measures of economic welfare that adjust consumption for income inequality and add or subtract the value of non-market benefits and social and environmental costs to estimate net economic welfare in a given year. In her talk, Laura will first review the GPI's development and applications over the last three decades, how the indicator has evolved, where it has been applied, and why, despite decades of studies, its methods remain unstandardised and its uptake in policy limited. She will then zoom in on the transition economies of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which since regaining independence in the early 1990s have shown some of Europe's fastest GDP growth, alongside persistent inequalities and depopulation, raising the question of whether that growth has translated into genuine welfare gains for all. This question is addressed by applying the GPI to the three countries for 1995-2023, where the findings indicate that economic welfare has generally kept pace with or exceeded GDP, though its growth appears to be slowing. The sensitivity analysis shows, however, that results depend heavily on valuation assumptions. The discussion will draw on both the review and this application to reflect on what a monetary aggregate can and cannot tell us, and to situate the GPI within the Beyond GDP agenda.

Laura Malinauskaitė is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Economics within the Environment and Natural Resources programme at the University of Iceland where she currently focuses on Beyond GDP and alternative measures of welfare. She holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Environment and Natural Resources from the University of Iceland, in which she explored human-nature interactions in Arctic coastal communities through the lens of ecosystem services, their values and governance, and has since worked across ecosystem services, food system transitions, and post-growth economics. Her post-doctoral research adapted and calculated the Genuine Progress Indicator for the transition economies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as a complement to GDP, alongside a broader multidimensional analysis of sustainable and inclusive wellbeing for the Baltic States.