MANILA -- Delegates at the High-Level Conference of Middle Income Countries held in the Philippines have agreed to rethink policies and new measures of growth beyond looking at just GDP expansion.

Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo said members of the Like-Minded Group for Middle-Income Countries (LMG-MICs) have adopted the ‘Makati Declaration’ to help middle-income economies. One of the topics covered by the declaration is to go beyond GDP as a measurement for growth.

“We should go beyond the simple measure of GDP to reflect the exact state of development. Measures would be needed to reflect, for example, progress on economic, social, and the environmental dimension of sustainable development especially in terms of considering access to development finance and technical cooperation,” Manalo said.

The Makati Declaration mentioned the establishment of a high-level expert group to develop recommendations for a limited number of country-owned and universally accepted indicators of sustainable development. Knowing all aspects of development can help middle-income nations through international support on blended finance, capacity-building, technology transfer, and new cooperation models beyond traditional aid.

Secretary Arsenio Balisacan of the newly named Department of Economy, Planning, and Development agreed that looking at other ways to measure development and growth to was needed see the bigger picture.

“There is a resounding call among members to supplement that metric with other metrics particularly those that can capture resilience, sustainability, vulnerability, and even things that impact, reflect better inclusion, polarization, things like that,” Balisacan said.

The United Nations, which is also one of the organizers of the conference, said there are now discussions on making guidelines on other measures of success.

“GDP basically only measures economic progress, so it’s not enough because it doesn’t show, for example, environmental degradation or environment sustainability, inequality and so on so forth,” said UN Under-Secretary-General Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana.

Manalo added, “We should recognize the development process is continuous and multi-dimensional and cannot be really defined or measured solely by GDP or GDP per capita.”

Aside from going beyond GDP, the ‘Makati Declaration’ also covered other issues like financing for development; debt sustainability, climate action and finance; digital transformation, science, technology, and innovation; and gender equality, decent work and social protection.

The Philippines hosted the two-day high-level conference as it begins the chairmanship of LMG-MICS, a group composed of over a dozen middle-income countries like Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Namibia, among many others.