Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, has called on politicians to ditch GDP as a measure of national wealth and replace it with one that quantifies well-being alongside economic strength. Mr Sarkozy claimed the focus on GDP as the main measure of prosperity had helped to trigger the financial crisis. Speaking at the launch of a report he commissioned from Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz , President Sarkozy said France would pioneer the new technique and urge other countries to follow suit. ‘GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being, and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it an increasingly poor one,’ Mr Stiglitz said. ‘It is time for our statistics system to put more emphasis on measuring the well-being of the population than on economic production.’ Increased household debt may drive up output numbers, without generating real growth in wealth, Mr Stiglitz argued. Similarly, the numbers do not take into account government contribution to economic output, which ranges from 39pc in the US to 48pc in France, or difficulties in estimating improvements in the quality of products such as cars. Mr Sarkozy claimed the focus […]