WISE Accounts

Beyond the System of National Accounts (“Beyond-SNA”) towards a framework for sustainable and inclusive wellbeing

April 2026

Beyond-GDP measurement systems provide either an index or a dashboard of indicators. However, these proposals are rarely embedded in a coherent accounting framework. This paper argues this is a mistake because the success of GDP cannot be separated from the broader success of the System of National Accounts (SNA). Rather than “Beyond-GDP” we need to go “Beyond-SNA”.

Based on decades of literature and initiatives, this report informs a Beyond-SNA strategy and provides the architecture for a new interdisciplinary accounting framework. It is not a full statistical manual, but rather a high-level description of the main features and sub-accounts. These “WISE accounts” are based on three concepts: Wellbeing (average current wellbeing), Inclusion (distribution of wellbeing) and Sustainability (future wellbeing). These dimensions are increasingly being used by international initiatives such as the UN High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) on Beyond-GDP. The interdisciplinary WISE accounting framework is unique in 3 ways:

1. It quantifies stocks/flows of the economic, social and environmental systems in multiple units (money, mass, people, time, etc)

2. It (e)valuates wellbeing, inclusion and sustainability using methods from various scientific schools of thought, thereby linking it to all the major Beyond-GDP indexes and dashboards

3. It is a global framework rather than a national one (the SNA has a national perspective), although the WISE accounts do of course have country-level data

This report also shows that the conceptual WISE accounts are empirically feasible, by leveraging and integrating various existing databases. A concrete suggestion about the way forward is provided.