Search

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was designed to reveal the economic, social, and environmental trade-offs associated with conventional economic growth as traditionally measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Although originally designed for use at the national scale, an interest has developed in the United States in a state-level uptake of the GPI to inform and guide policy. This study presents the first fifty-state estimate for U.S. GPI in order to address questions over its design, implementation, and ultimate potential as a tool to guide state-level economic policy. Following a review of the current state of analysis and critique of GPI, we provide an overview of methodology and database development. Results are then presented, including discussion of lessons learned through a fifty-state application. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research and next steps to consolidating a consistent methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents response of the author on comments made by Lewis E. Hill on the papers "Toward a Reconciliation of Institutional Economics and Its Critics" and "Beyond the Market Economy Building Institutions That Work," by Clarence E. Ayres that were published in the March 1970 issue of the periodical "Social Science Quarterly." Under appropriate arrangements for doing things, that is, under an appropriate institutional structure, the propensity to truck and barter naturally entails the creation of markets, which are themselves arrangements for effecting exchange. In the U.S., the institutional structure is such that markets permeate most of the economy. For example, in August 1970, nearly 84 per cent of total civilian employment was in the private sector, all of which consists of regulated and more or less unregulated markets. Thus, employing scholar Robert L. Heilbroner's system of classification, the economy of the U.S. would be appropriately designated as essentially a market system, as the author did in his introduction to Ayres' classic. "Institutionalism and Economic Development." But Ayres objects to him, that the U.S. economy is an industrial economy. Unfortunately, his is not intended to be a cross-classification, which, if correct, would be a suitable complement rather than a substitute for the one that the author employed, since Ayres says prefatorily, and the author flatly denies that the U.S. economy is a market economy.

The article presents response of the author on comments made by Lewis E. Hill on the papers "Toward a Reconciliation of Institutional Economics and Its Critics" by Coldwell Daniel and "Beyond the Market Economy Building Institutions That Work" that were published in the March 1970 issue of the periodical "Social Science Quarterly." Hill's Comment on the exchange between Daniel and the author is perfectly right in pointing out that he gave no reasons for insisting that theirs is an industrial economy rather than a market economy, as Daniel has declared. If it is not too late, the author would like to repair that omission. In various important senses theirs is of course a market economy. Obviously buying and selling go on almost everywhere and almost all the time; and scholar Karl Polanyi was quite right in pointing out that ours is the only economy in history in which buying and selling have been as general and as significant as they are today throughout the Western world--or at least throughout the free world. The question is: significant of what? Many writers have maintained that freedom to buy and sell is the quintessence of freedom, and that people who do not enjoy this freedom are not free. This may be true. But it is not the whole story. In particular it is not the whole story of economic development. Such freedom --the market may have been a necessary condition but not the determinant of the modern Western economy.