(not exhaustive)
- 13.02: SPD finished "Oestrich-Winkel survey"
- 08:02: SPD wants legal clarity on sewage charges
- 04:02: SPD Newsletter
"(...) the importance of growth in the economy and society, develop a holistic prosperity and progress indicator, and the possibilities and limits of the link between growth, resource depletion and technical sound progress. "is that they are in good company. For both the European Commission is currently working on a "strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth" as well of the recent G20 summit of finance ministers agreed on criteria
"(...) should be measured by which future imbalances between economies. This will obviously include the debt-plus budget deficit of a country. Also, the respective private saving rate, the real exchange rate and the trade and current account should be taken into account. (...) This is done in a more balanced basis for sustainable growth are created in the world. "But the SPD, which can already be considered positive, has been searching for a new, more sustainable growth concept in their paper published earlier this year "Recent progress and democracy" :
"Growth is necessary but more than ever we need to decide what to grow in our society and what must shrink. What we now call economic growth, was originally just a statistic to calculate the total power of a state. If this sum of one year to rise, called the growth. Not all services are included in this number, for example, the performance of a housewife who feeds a large family is not in the statistics because they can not be calculated exactly. (...) However, difficulties arise when purely quantitative growth is the only discernible purpose of the policy. Where the purely statistical increase in the growth raised to the ultimate goal of all politics is, the company waives its democratically elected first. From the primacy of politics, the primacy of economics over politics. (...) Social Democrats have long known that not all growth is progress. (...) The political task consists in the selection, because the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) alone is no more synonymous with social progress as the surrendered. (...) The traditional measure of success - the gross domestic product (GDP) - is limited as a welfare indicator because it can be incorporated in the long term harmful elements positive growth in his bill. Broader welfare measures are While everyone is talking about, but there is as yet no consensus index for several countries. The aim must be to develop a holistic prosperity and progress indicator. We must work even more on the decoupling of economic growth and resource use. Economic, social and financial measures should be evaluated by whether they tell the ecological truth. For this we need to measure growth rate differently. We need additional and new indicators of wealth and well as the distribution of income, life expectancy and educational attainment in our country. And we need a system in which the ecological "footprint" by Natural resource use in the future receive a prize. (...) Ecology and sustainability are the cornerstones of the economy of the 21st Century.The Financial Times reported in its series "Reboot economics" of Stefan Bergheim , a scientific pioneer in the search for alternative growth concepts in Germany.
"While the earth quakes in Chile or in Angola, a war breaks out, increases in the subsequent reconstruction work, the gross domestic product (GDP). For the welfare of the population can be maintained almost the same. Despite such shortcomings, the GDP has been Decades, the central measure of economic development. Stefan Bergheim, formerly employed at Deutsche Bank, has set itself the aim of devoting his specially created think tank the subject.
Bergheim has developed a new indicator: the so-called progress index. It contains the components of income, health, education and environment - represented by the national income, life expectancy at birth, the students and student ratios and the "ecological footprint" of a country that measures the use of resources. It is the first of its kind in Germany and also the first in which both the income and environmental aspects. In addition, he is superior to many existing methods GDP alternatives. (...) For politicians have dimensions as well as the progress index a simple advantage over GDP: It allows you to measure much better, how satisfied are the voters and how successful their own policy. Bergheim approach adopted is not entirely on income as a measure .(...) The Federal Statistical Office to a wealthy database on the web, as is usual for example in Australia. At the local level should also arise decentralized initiatives of the welfare measure - with a central coordination unit, as used for instance in Canada.