ABSTRACT
This chapter explores various ways of constructing economic indicators of sustainable development. In reality, the great majority of these indicators are not indicators of sustainability, but environmental indicators which show trends in the environment and, sometimes, in social and economic conditions. The genuine savings measure also has the capacity to surprise, as we showed in Blueprint 3. There the genuine savings indicator revealed that the UK was pursuing an unsustainable development path throughout most of the 1980s. Many developing countries are highly dependent on resource extraction activities and the depletion of these assets often means that high levels of savings need to be generated if aggregate real wealth is not to be run down. All of the indicators relate to weak sustainability, that is they all assume that there is some form of substitution between capital assets. The chapter suggests that a good part of the weak versus strong debate is misguided since weak sustainability is common to both approaches.
