Hi Everyone,

I am working with INSEAD and a young Paris based think tank which is trying to integrate and analyze the global data files released by UN statistics. There I had to update myself with few national accounts terminologies when I came across something called "Green GDP"

Well, GDP or Gross Domestic Product is the economic value of all the goods and services produced within a nation's geographical boundary. Green Gross Domestic Product refers to GDP compensated with bringing in account an estimated price for the changes in climate change and loss of biodiversity caused by the economic growth activity. Googling further got me introduced with another index called "Happy Planet Index" (HPI). It is a human index which includes the environmental impacts as well.  With obvious curiosity I searched for my home country, India's position in a rank list released by the New Economic Foundation, the British think-tank working for ecological economics which introduced HPI.

I found India was ranked at 90th position with 42.46 points in 2006. In 2009, it climbed up to the rank of 35 with 53 points. The index is decided with a complex formula which is loosely based on life satisfaction multiplied with life expectancy divided by the ecological footprint per capita.

Countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam were doing far better than my country. Giving a quick glance at the bottom of the list I saw the name of the macro economy Russia at 172nd position out of 178 countries (2006, it might have pulled out itself off from the 2009 survey). Then I remembered the neighboring giant economy of China...surprisingly China was at 31st place moving up to 20th place from 55.99 points to 57.1 points. I wondered what might have made richer nations to end up with lower HPI ranks.

Well, China is a poor and rural country when compared with the giants. Although it practices heavy unscientific and ungreen methods for its economic activities its larger population bring down the per capita environmental destruction. In a country like Russia, its lower population equiped with the latest economic technologies produces a far more per capita effects, but the objective being the welfare of it citizens.

So the economy has evolved in such a way that the richer advanced nations have a bad per capita effect on the planet. And the villain all throughout is the fossil fuel based technologies being used since decades. I wonder...what if we had all renewable energy based methods since the beginning of industrial revolution...and at a mediocre micro-level, would that have made the richer countries more proud (because they are developed without a negative mark on the planet) or more humble (because they are developed without a negative mark on the planet, again)?