During the last decades hundreds of initiatives have been developed all over the world in order to propose innovative frameworks able to move in “beyond GDP” perspective. Concepts as social indicators, basic needs, human development, sustainable development, quality of life or societal progress have been at the centre of the debate for enhancing the use of economic, social and environmental indicators. Milestones of this debate have been the Human Development Reports and the so-called Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report. One of the major themes contained in it was to encourage the use of new well‐being metrics in policy decisions in order to move beyond identifying “problems” as well as to anchor well‐being metrics in the design, implementation and evaluation of public policies. Different activities were implemented within the European Statistical System and several NSIs have started to publish SDG indicators as required for the implementation of the Agenda 2030 for the Sustainable Development. Although these experiences shared a common framework background, a complete integration was lacking, making it difficult to carry out comparisons and to read the information on a similar scale from local to national and European level. These different initiatives are hardly linked with a policy agenda with very few exceptions. In this context MAKSWELL project worked to extend and harmonise the indicators able to capture the main characteristics of the beyond-GDP approach proposing a new framework that includes them in the evaluation of the public policies. The work carried out has described the state of the art on relevant dimensions of sustainable development and on vulnerabilities of society. Analysis has investigated statistical methodologies for the use of new data sources and for measuring poverty and inequality at regional level; developed a framework for assessing survey discontinuity; extended macroeconomic models to well-being and SDGs variables; provided evidence on the use of well-being and SDGs frameworks in Italy and Hungary. The final aim was to improve data and information for policy making and provide suggestions and best practices for a better design of future research. At the conclusion of this action, MAKSWELL project confirms that when the statistical community, the academic community and other civil society stakeholders work together for a common goal, the outcome can be impressive.
