Dissatisfaction with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as an indicator of a country's development or a population's wellbeing led to the development of the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). The GPI is an aggregate index of over 20 economic, social and environmental indicators, and accounts for both the welfare benefits of economic growth, and the social and environmental costs which accompany that economic growth. The result is better information about the level of welfare or well-being of a country's population. This book measures the GPI of Hong Kong and Singapore from 1968 to 2010. It finds that for both countries, economic output (as measured by the GDP) has grown more than welfare (as measured by the GPI), but important differences are also found. In Hong Kong, the GPI has grown for the whole period under consideration, while in Singapore the GPI has stalled from 1993. This is in line with most countries and is explained by the "threshold hypothesis" which states that beyond a certain level of economic development the benefits of further economic growth are outweighed by even higher environmental and social costs. The book argues that the growth of Hong Kong's GPI is due to its favourable relationship with China and in particular its ability to export low-wage jobs and polluting industries, rather than successful domestic policies. A stalling or shrinking GPI calls for alternative policies than the growth economy promoted by neoclassical economists, and the book explores an alternative model, that of the Steady State Economy (SSE).

Developed in the 1930s, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was never meant to be an indicator of the level of welfare of a population, but its emphasis by politicians and news outlets has made it become one of the most popular indicators of development . Increasingly scholars have criticized the emphasis on the GDP, and put forward other indicators, amongst which is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), an aggregate index of over 20 economic, social and environmental indicators, which are added or subtracted depending on whether they are considered as contributing to, or subtracting from, people s welfare or well-being.

The most interesting and useful research related to the GPI consists in its comparison to the GDP. This is the first book to calculate the GPI of Hong Kong and Singapore from 1968 to 2011. The book explores how in most other countries the GDP has increased faster than the GPI, with the GPI stabilizing during the 1970s or 1980s because the social and environmental costs of development associated with rapid economic growth slowed down genuine progress, as measured by the GPI. This has been explained with the threshold hypothesis, which states that once a certain level of development of a country is reached, the GPI no longer increases, even if the economy (as measured by the GDP) grows. Yet in Hong Kong and Singapore the GPI only stabilized in 1998. The book examines this in light of the deindustrialization of Hong Kong and Singapore, the Asian Economic Crisis, and the continued investment in infrastructure. The book also discusses the policy implications of a slowdown of the GPI, in terms of promoting a steady state economy where economic growth is no longer the goal of government policies.