Keynote speech by Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič at the Beyond Growth 2023 conference

European Commission - Speech [Check Against Delivery] Keynote speech by Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič at the Beyond Growth 2023 conference Brussels, 15 May 2023 Thank you Aurore [Lalucq] for the introduction, and good afternoon to you all. It is a pleasure to be here at the European Parliament for the Beyond Growth 2023 conference. The debate over how to measure growth in our society is not a new one. The Limits to Growth report, for example, was published more than half a century ago. The European Union held its first high-level conference on this topic back in 2007. And today, various initiatives such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals aim to revitalise a global partnership for sustainable development. But despite a general agreement that using Gross Domestic Product by itself to measure the growth and progress of our society is a limited approach, progress in integrating this idea into policymaking has been slow. GDP growth remains our main point of reference. But what would happen if we took into account other factors, like environmental sustainability? Would the world ranking change for, say, Saudi Arabia, whose GDP was the 18th highest in the world in 2022, but almost half of which was due to oil extraction? This is the question we started asking ourselves in our 2021 Strategic Foresight Report, when considering the fact that India is projected to surpass Europe in terms of nominal GDP by 2050. The Report called for a shift towards a...