Beyond Gdp—new Approaches to Applied Statistics

New social concerns and priorities–beyond the economic growth paradigm–pose a challenge to the established statistical systems. The initial response of developing overall welfare measures and social indicators of the human quality of life had little impact on official statistics. Environment statistics, on the other hand, has become accepted as a new branch of applied statistics, maturing from exclusive pollution monitoring to cover various aspects of natural resources and the man‐made environment. Still, a rather artificial separation between ecological monitoring and modeling and anthropocentric environmental statistics and accounting persists. The assessment of complex and interrelated socioeconomic and environmental concerns requires comparable inter‐disciplinary information. The provision of such information should be facilitated by a flexible framework approach to statistical coordination and integration.