Surveying potential macro indicators beyond GDP

The SWINS project (Sustainable Well-being through Investment in Social Services) aims to measure how investments in social services throughout the life-course contribute to wellbeing. Building on the capability approach (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011) and the social investment life-course multiplier theory (Hemerijck et al., 2023) SWINS treats investments in social services as tools to expand individual and collective capacities over the life course, contributing to sustainable and inclusive wellbeing at the macro level. In order to measure the impact of investments in sustainable social services, such as early childhood education and care (ECEC), active labour market policies (ALMPs), long-term care and primary healthcare, we need to outline a set of outcome indicators that are both theoretically grounded and measurable. We build on the emerging beyond GDP initiatives in Europe, in particular the European Commission's Sustainable and Inclusive Wellbeing (SIWB) dashboard (Benczúr et al., 2025), which is a multidimensional framework for measuring wellbeing, inclusiveness, and sustainability across EU member states. We aim to select a reduced but representative subset of the 50 headline SIWB indicators that may serve as outcome measures for investments in foundational, enabling, and protective social services throughout the life-course. First, we introduce simplified theories of change for foundational, enabling and protective social services over the life course that guide our selection of plausible direct and indirect outcome indicators from the pool of 50 SIWB indicators. Second, we apply principal component analysis (PCA) to the imputed SIWB panel dataset (EU-27, 2011–2023) to further streamline these selected indicators into a subset of indicators that explain the greatest share of variance within each group of outcome measures, categorized by life-course stages. The final shortlist of beyond-GDP outcome indicators aims to support future empirical and agent-based modelling work within the SWINS project. The paper is structured as follows. First, we review the European Beyond GDP landscape and introduce the SIWB framework. Second, we describe the SWINS categorization of social services into foundational, enabling, and protective social services that broadly fit the life-course stages. Third, using the life course-based categories of social services, we select plausible outcome indicators from SIWB for each category based on simplified theories of change. Fourth, we report the PCA results for each category. Finally, we conclude with a shortlist of outcome indicators, limitations and next steps.