In February of 2008, amid the looming global financial crisis, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France asked Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, along with the distinguished French economist Jean Paul Fitoussi, to establish a commission of leading economists to study whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP)--the most widely used measure of economic activity--is a reliable indicator of economic and social progress.

Author Biography

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is university professor at Columbia University and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute. He is the author of The Stiglitz Report, co-author of Measuring What Counts, and a co-editor of For Good Measure. He lives in New York City. Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and was until 2004 the master of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1998 he received the Nobel Prize in Economics and in 2012 the National Humanities Medal. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jean-Paul Fitoussi is professor emeritus at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (SciencesPo), Paris, and professor at LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome. He is a co-author of Measuring What Counts and a co-editor of For Good Measure. He lives in Paris.