Sustainable and Inclusive Wellbeing (SIW) provides an overarching policy goal to guide governance and policy choices in accordance with European values and for the benefit of long-term prosperity and resilience. Pursuing that goal requires the right navigation tools. Yet despite the emergence of numerous alternative metrics that offer a more holistic view of sustainability, inclusion and wellbeing than Gross Domestic Product (GDP), their uptake remains fragmented and limited, not least because the sheer multidimensionality of wellbeing makes headline measures difficult to build and dashboards hard to communicate.
MERGE has conducted a series of technical and data deep dives, and this report offers an overview of the six co-creative workshops that took place, with topics focusing on data harmonisation and collection for wellbeing and sustainability indicators in the EU, comprehensive welfare measures, time use surveys and wealth accounting.
The data harmonisation work began with interviews of 19 staff working in National Statistical Institutes (NSIs), government bodies or inter-governmental organisations across 10 countries, validated at an online roundtable with 18 participants in November 2025. The comprehensive welfare measures workshop brought 32 experts from NSIs including the UK’s ONS, Italy’s ISTAT and France’s INSEE, together with the OECD, the JRC, the UN Statistical Division and universities including Ghent, UCL, Leiden and Cambridge, to the National Bank of Belgium in October 2025. The time use and wealth accounting workshops, led by ONS between January and November 2025, brought together NSI staff, academics and researchers online.
Three overarching insights emerged across all six workshops.
Building better metrics is also a collaborative and political effort
Developing SIW measurement frameworks is less of a data problem than a collaboration problem. Across the workshops, partnership between NSIs and academic researchers was repeatedly identified as the collaboration that unlocks cutting-edge ideas and creativity in each thematic domain: the comprehensive welfare measures workshop itself, bringing together UGent, ONS, the JRC, the OECD, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and universities from Cambridge to Stanford, was an example of this model at work. Participants also pointed out that some NSIs are further along in piloting SIW measures than others, and sharing that experience directly helps institutes with less capacity avoid starting from scratch on methods someone else has already tested.
But collaboration alone does not institutionalise a framework. Political will and momentum, including from international spaces, were consistently named as the decisive driver, both at the early stages of developing a framework and for its long-term survival. According to interviews behind the data harmonisation work, getting a framework off the ground depends mostly on political backing and a champion inside the NSI willing to push it forward. Keeping it alive over time needs something different: the ability to survive changes in government, which relies more on institutional conditions, such as NSI independence and a legal mandate to keep reporting the data, than on political enthusiasm alone.
Even where political will exists, skills are yet another obstacle to address. Participants across workshops flagged specific gaps, in measuring the environment, in capturing subjective wellbeing, in using geospatial and other newer data sources, that no amount of political backing alone will close. Political will opens the door; dedicated training and capacity-building are what walk through it.
Existing accounting systems are the starting point, but by no means the limit
The System of National Accounts (SNA) shapes what NSIs can realistically adopt. That makes proposals connected directly to the SNA easier to operationalise than ones that sit outside it. In the comprehensive welfare measures workshop, participants mapped out how the many competing “beyond GDP” measures already in circulation relate to each other, from those closest to standard economic accounts to those that go furthest in capturing wellbeing, giving statisticians a shared map instead of dozens of disconnected proposals.
But participants were equally clear that what is technically convenient today should not define the ceiling of ambition. The clearest example is the push to value things like natural capital, cultural heritage and ecosystem services, assets that generate real economic and social value but have no market price. Rather than waiting for a perfect valuation method, the wealth accounting workshops backed an “improvement over perfection” approach: starting with shadow pricing — estimating prices for things with no market value — for the biggest gaps, such as climate impacts and ecosystem services, and refining the method over time.
Harmonisation works best at the level of indicators, not whole frameworks, and needs proper resourcing
The third cross-cutting finding was that NSIs consistently prefer harmonising indicators over harmonising entire frameworks. As one interviewee in the data harmonisation work put it, “we should seek to standardise the coats, not the coat rack.” Countries want the freedom to build frameworks that fit their own national priorities and public consultations, while still agreeing on a common core of headline indicators that make comparison between countries possible.
The time use workshops showed what this looks like in practice for the UK, where the ONS’s Online Time Use Survey and the Centre for Time Use Research’s ELiDDI produced data of comparable quality to traditional paper-based surveys while cutting costs and time substantially. This depended on countries asking the same questions in the same categories each time, rather than changing the survey design from one survey to the next.
International guidance, from the UN HLEG to Eurostat, the JRC and the OECD, was repeatedly identified as a way to pave this road without inhibiting national innovation. But harmonisation, like everything else in this agenda, requires proper resourcing, including sufficient funding and appropriate capabilities. At the moment, this remains among the most important challenges NSIs face when developing and implementing innovative SIW indicators, and it is not something statisticians can fix by themselves. It requires policy direction and support.
Recommendations for NSIs and policymaking actors
For NSIs, the workshops suggest that the most useful next steps are to keep building on existing accounting systems rather than around them, to prioritise harmonising indicators over harmonising whole frameworks, and to invest in the specific skills gaps that came up repeatedly: environmental data, subjective wellbeing, and newer data sources.
For policymakers, the more decisive contribution is the part NSIs cannot provide on their own: proper funding, continuity across changes in government, and formally embedding these tools in how policy is designed and evaluated, rather than leaving them as side projects. The report’s own note of caution is that without that political follow-through, NSIs risk building tools that end up going unused.
These findings will feed directly into MERGE’s forthcoming technical and policy guidelines (D7.1, due September 2026), with particular attention to harmonising data sources and integrating time use statistics into the wider SIW measurement agenda.
Read the report below:
Authors: Magalí Brosio, Rachèle Chevallier, Himanshi Bhardwaj, Brent Bleys, Andrea Ferrannini, Toa Giroletti
