Existing prosperity indicators , most notably Gross Domestic Product (GDP) , provide an incomplete and often misleading account of global well-being. They measure economic throughput while systematically excluding distributional equity, environmental degradation, and systemic resilience. This paper proposes the Planetary Index Value (PIV), a novel composite indicator designed to measure the aggregate health of the planet by synthesizing three recalibrated sub-indices: the Human Development Gap (ΔHD), the Adjusted Environmental Performance Index (ΔEPI), and the Adjusted Resilience Score (ΔRes). The PIV is defined as the proportion of countries whose Country Index Value (CIV) falls below a threshold of 1.0, where CIV represents the sum of a country's unrealized human development potential, environmental performance shortfall, and inverse risk exposure. Applied to a dataset of 105 countries using 10-year averaged data from 2010 to 2021, the analysis yields a baseline PIV of 0.60, indicating that 63 of 105 assessed countries currently operate below the sustainability threshold embedded in the composite framework. The paper presents the theoretical foundations of the indicator, justifies methodological choices including the recalibration of EPI sub-weights and the inversion of the resilience score, documents data sources and calculation procedures, and discusses the indicator's design properties, limitations, and directions for future development. The PIV is proposed as a practical, annually updatable, publicly communicable measure of planetary health suitable for policy benchmarking and global governance reporting.
Adith Shabarish (Wed,) studied this question.