The Gross Domestic Product has historically been the main indicator for measuring the development of a given territory. GDP, or the production of a country, has repeatedly sought to explain the well-being of a territory. It is known, however, that this indicator has had weak points. The article The Hole in the Gini Index published in this journal, for example, clearly explained the inability of GDP to explain the inequalities that may exist in the distribution of wealth in a territory. In addition, this indicator does not differentiate between the goods or services produced. In other words, it takes into account all the production that can be counted, whether the food we need to survive, or the production of weapons that will be used thousands of kilometres.

In recent years there has been a major hurricane at the expense of warships and weapons sold to Saudi Arabia, and images from Yemen show that these weapons have served to commit the massacre rather than to ensure security. This is an issue that undoubtedly affects the public administration, as it has created a clash between guaranteeing economic interests and human rights, and has highlighted the inconsistency between the various policies. In this regard: The concept of Development Policy Coherence has gained strength in the last two decades. It has been a request from the Development Cooperation area. In a way, if in projects promoted from different administrative levels in third countries, mainly in the territories of the south, funds have been allocated to fight poverty or promote peace, since cooperation has sought to identify and make visible actions that from the same administrations can have a negative impact.

Coherence of Development Policies is an important research issue. The initiatives for their promotion have been very diverse. One of these is the GPKI or Development Policy Coherence Index www.icpd.info, an attempt to assess countries according to their degree of coherence. In addition to the economic perspective, it includes social, environmental, global vision and production. This instrument, which can be used to measure a country’s development, includes variables that are negatively valued (such as military spending, ecological footprint or financial secrecy rate), and is probably its main contribution. Two reports published since 2016 have put on the table items that do not show GDP. From an environmental point of view, for example, no European territory appears in the first 45 posts.

It is possible to spend hours in the salsa of the novelties raised by the indicator GPKI, but it cannot be forgotten that measuring in numbers the well-being of a territory will always have a critical issue, since the factors that cannot be quantified are diverse. The measurement of coherence between policies seems to me to reveal the resistance to changing economic and financial interests, and in this respect I think it is also useful to remember that GDP is unstable. It cannot be forgotten that in this political campaign that has filled us with data, which is the recent past, behind each given data there has been a certain interest, and each of the indicators used has given us the partial truth of reality. Indeed, whatever you want to try, I have no doubt that you can always find an appropriate indicator.