Preface

Green growth is about fostering growth and development, while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies. Governments that pursue policies designed to promote green growth, need to catalyse investment and innovation that underpin growth and give rise to new economic opportunities. They also need indicators that can raise awareness, measure progress and identify opportunities and risks.

This report updates and extends the set of green growth indicators presented in the 2014 and 2011 editions. It charts the progress that OECD countries and G20 economies have made since 1990. The 2017 edition places greater emphasis on the role of policy action, with enriched discussion on environmentally related taxes and subsidies, technology and innovation, and international financial flows.

Citizens of OECD and G20 countries aspire at better quality of life, but they also increasingly acknowledge that there are limits to the Earth’s capacity to support healthy life for all. More ambitious policies are needed to achieve a balance between economic progress and environmental goals. Delivering growth of a quality up to citizens’ aspirations will require concerted action both across countries and across all ministries invested in green growth, including finance, economy, industry, trade and agriculture.

This report is the result of work bringing together insights from a wide range of policy areas. Twenty-eight countries including emerging and developing economies have already relied on the OECD green growth measurement framework to develop their own set of indicators. International organisations, including UNSD and those participating in the Green Growth Knowledge Platform routinely draw on the OECD green growth measurement framework.

Major methodological developments since 2014 include new indicators that show how measures of economic productivity could be adjusted to take into account natural resources used and pollution; improved indicators on technological innovation and environmentally harmful subsidies; better measures of population exposure to air pollution and its economic costs.

On-going work focuses on improving measures of raw materials embodied in international trade, better evaluating the sustainability of natural resource use, and better understanding land cover changes. OECD continues to actively engage in global efforts to implement the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting, and provide support to countries as they advance in their efforts to monitor the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development.

We remain committed to working closely with national and international partners to ensure that green growth indicators are analytically sound, and that they support policies that enhance the lives not only of this but also future generations.

Paris, March 2017

Rintaro Tamaki

OECD Deputy Secretary-General