Social Progress: The Next Development Agenda

How do we measure development? The Social Progress Index (SPI) was launched in 2013 as a holistic approach to benchmarking countries’ social performance, independent of economic measures. The SPI has been widely taken up on a global basis in evaluating national performance, and sub-national indices are proliferating at the regional and city level. In this lecture, Professor Porter will describe the insights that the SPI provides about the relationship between economic development and social progress, along with exploring the implications for development thinking and how the World Bank can best deliver on its “shared prosperity” goal.