Since 1934, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been the single metric used to evaluate countries’ progress. In 2012, the Boston Consulting Group created a new progress evaluation system called Sustainable Economic Development Assessment (SEDA).
Based on 50,000 different types of data points publicly available in areas like health, environmental protection, and freedom of expression, and grouped in ten different categories, SEDA measures people’s well-being, not only a country’s economic output.
Key Aspects of SEDA
- Well-Being Over GDP: Unlike traditional economic measures, SEDA evaluates how well economic growth translates into improvements in citizens’ quality of life.
- Three Core Elements:
- Economics: Income, economic stability, employment.
- Investments: Education, health, infrastructure.
- Sustainability: Environment, governance, civil society.
- Ten Dimensions:
- Income
- Economic Stability
- Employment
- Health
- Education
- Infrastructure
- Equality
- Governance
- Environment
- Civil Society
- Relative vs. Absolute Performance:
- It compares absolute performance (raw scores across dimensions) and relative performance (how efficiently a country converts wealth into well-being).
- Wealth-to-Well-Being Coefficient:
- A measure of how effectively a country translates its wealth into well-being (higher values indicate better performance).
The most recent comprehensive assessment of countries using the Sustainable Economic Development Assessment (SEDA) framework by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) was published in 2019. This report utilized data up to 2017 to evaluate the well-being of citizens across various nations.
The SEDA framework has become a crucial reference point in my personal work, trying to create a similar evaluation tool and framework for the design practice.
