Sozialalmanach - Caritas Luxembourg

make the necessary investments in healthcare and welfare to support such a development. In
the US, on the other hand, the social debate since the onset of the crisis has focused almost
exclusively on healthcare reform. There are significant political hurdles to achieving such
reform, as the bitter and even violent debates on the issue in the US demonstrate. Obama
is cautious about taxes, but according to Nancy Birdsall 51 , a shift towards a more European
social model and a retreat from the ‘cowboy’ model of capitalism seems inevitable, in spite
of the American emphasis on low taxes and low government expenditures.
Future productivity growth is likely to come from sources like green energy and low
carbon path investments. However, the challenge, writes Nancy Birdsall, will be to find
funding, from either the market or the government, to finance the R&D that forms the
backbone of these new sectors of the low-carbon economy.
Going beyond welfare state recalibration and sustainable development as separate
phenomena, Jacques Delors, Tony Atkinson, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi 52 underscore the need
for different set of indicators of social and economic progress exceeding the traditional
measure of GDP growth. In fact, the crisis is partially the result of the exclusive focus
on economic growth. The formulation of a new portfolio of social and economic indicators
(including, for example, various dimensions of adult numeracy and literacy, access
to public services, poverty, and environmental health and climate control) is especially
politically opportune in the face of a period of lethargic and drawn-out recovery. GDP
growth may no longer be an adequate proxy for ‘doing well’. To address this issue, in
early 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy put together a committee of leading economists, chaired
by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, to rethink GDP as an indicator
of economic performance and to consider alternative indicators of social progress. The
unifying theme of the report that came out in September 2009 is that the time is ripe for
shifting measurement from indicators of economic production to people’s income and
consumption, jointly with wealth, with an emphasis households perspective. In other words,
the Commission renders more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption
and wealth, in correspondence with sustainability indicators 53 . What is interesting to note
here is that economic progress and international coordination, in the views presented by
Delors, Fitoussi, Atkinson, Birdsall and Rodrik 54 , are made contingent upon substantive
policy choices, such as poverty reduction and climate management, in much the same way
as the regime of ‘embedded liberalism’ hinged on (male) full employment and adequate
51 Birdsall (2008).
52 Delors (2006); Atkinson et al. (2002); Fitoussi (2009).
53 Stiglitz et al. (2009).
54 Delors (2006); Fitoussi (2009); Atkinson et al. (2002); Birdsall (2008); Rodrik (2007).
179