Women and nature’s value are excluded from national economies. The GDP is a misleading measure of a country’s wealth.

Since its creation against the backdrop of World War Two and the Great Depression, it is used so widely that its origins as a completely artificial construct to track wartime activity are often forgotten.

In the eyes and minds of its creators, neither caring nor volunteering nor communities were considered relevant for the score based metric of an economic system that devalues stereotypically women-related things and maintains a culture of inequality.

This is even more absurd when you consider that certain national GDP figures actually do include black market transactions such as drug sales and prostitution, illegal trade in natural resources or weapons.

This shows that conventional economic measures use human life and natural resource as a means to manipulate abstract numbers even if they promote inequality, war, and environmental degradation.

The two crises that have occurred in the last few years highlight the absurdity of our system. The Covid-19 epidemic and Russia’s invasion in Ukraine caused extraordinary suffering, but also sparked unprecedented waves of solidarity among European societies. The selfless efforts of volunteers, combined with decisions that went against the maximisation of profit principles by the market, have saved many lives and prevented many disaster scenarios.

The GDP numbers did not reflect this. They were a remnant of an alternative reality based on simplistic economic models. They showed how much more value could have been generated if we had turned a blind-eye to destruction.

Riane Eisler, a political scientist, says that the real wealth of nations goes beyond financial gains. It also includes contributions from people and our environment. Kate Raworth’s (Doughnut Economics), for example, is a pioneering economist whose work can guide us to meet human needs while staying within the limits of our planet.

Women’s invisible work

Women do the majority of unpaid work in the world. According to estimates, cooking, cleaning, gathering food, or caring for elderly and children may account for up to 60% of GDP.

Care-giving is often not recognised, and many women are forced to work part-time or in unpaid employment. Not to mention the human cost of caregiving: in all EU countries on average, about half of all care workers report emotional strains. 38 percent are exhausted after work or most of the time. And 30 percent say their work negatively impacts their health.

According to economist Jayati ghosh, in a FEPS/FES study, the misallocations of precarious carework — which are often the result of cultural norms, lack of public services, and not choice — are not only unfair, but also inefficient, considering the great potential they could have to contribute towards the economy, human well-being, and social development.

Gross National Happiness

We should be careful to avoid making the same mistakes again when we discuss in Europe’s Parliament how to move beyond growth. We cannot tolerate policies that do not support the essential work of caring for others. Beyond growth policies which are not feminist may add to the existing inequality if they don’t focus on quality, nature, education, and the underlying social economic and biodiversity that makes our world possible.

The Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations include a goal to reduce gender imbalances of unpaid work. This goal specifically states that unpaid care work and domestic work should be recognised and valued through public services, policies on infrastructure and social protection and by promoting shared responsibility in the family and household. We are still far away from achieving this goal.

There are many alternative indicators that can guide us to success as a society. These include the Social Wealth Index and the Index for Sustainable Welfare.

The Genuine Progress Indicator is based on criteria such as education, health, leisure, and sustainability.

The Gross National Happiness Index (GNH) measures the collective happiness in a nation by examining nine domains: psychological wellbeing, material well-being, good governance (good governance), health, education (community vitality), cultural diversity (cultural diversity), balanced time use (balanced time use), ecological diversity.

The recent experience with the Covid-19 pandemic, and the economic effects of the war in Ukraine, triggered new policies – to a large extent led by progressive women – focusing on social and environment wellbeing, including greater investments in public healthcare, the reduction in air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, or biodiversity conservation.

They have joined the wellbeing economy coalition to advance their common ambitions. This is supported by an increasing number of academic researchers and civil society organizations, as well as concerned citizens.

We must seize this moment to make a paradigm shift, reorganize our societies, and restructure our economies. We must move away from a growth model based on GDP and towards a post-growth model that is people-centred and care-focused, and respects the environmental, recognising that human health and planet health are two sides the same coin.

Faced with rising uncertainty, we need resilient, multi-stakeholder coalitions to jointly construct our paths towards a sustainable, humane, and socially just – and therefore, inherently feminist – Europe.

The delegation of the European Parliament’s budget control committee reviewed the progress of the implementation of 27 super milestones – the measures that the EU Commission has set forth for the Hungarian government to unfreeze Cohesion and Covid Recovery Funds.

Hohlmeier stated that Hungary should implement measures “as quickly and as soon as possible”.

Last December, the EU countries approved a plan to grant Hungary EUR5,8bn under the bloc’s Covid-19 Recovery Plan, on the condition that Budapest implement 27 reform targets. These included strengthening judicial independence, and putting new anti-corruption measures in place.

The EU also suspended EUR6.3bn of cohesion fund payments to Hungary due to concerns about rule-of-law, which the EU claimed put the budget of the bloc at risk.

The negotiations between the government of Hungary and the commission are ongoing, but without any breakthrough.

MEPs do not have a direct say in the unlocking of funds. The European Parliament has kept up political pressure on EU officials to ensure that Hungary adheres to EU rules regarding independent judiciary, and fights corruption before receiving EU funds.

“The picture that emerged” […] Lara Wolters, a Dutch left-wing MEP, said that the lack of information regarding financial oversight of government expenditures, as well as issues in control audits of public procurements and conflict of interests, is a major concern for us.

“Real structural change is the only way to bring about real change.” [changes]She added that the media in Hungary was hostile towards the committee.

Media close to the government asked the MEPs at the press conference if EU money was connected to Hungary’s rejection to perceived EU policies regarding migration, gender and Ukraine. They also asked if the MEPs supported the delivery of weapons to Ukraine and what they thought of corruption in Brussels.

Petri Sarvamaa, a centre-right MEP from Finland, said in Budapest: “We don’t invent this stuff.” He added: “Our only purpose is to make sure that the EU budget in any member state is not at risk. This is not about Hungary.

Hohlmeier also added that the committee traveled to Spain Italy and Bulgaria to monitor EU expenditure.

Daniel Freund, German Green MEP, however, said that despite his eighth visit to Hungary he found “unthinkable” things in any other EU country.

“A rule by decretal, a state emergency for eight years, now ongoing, 95 amendments to the budget [in 2022] “Armed inspections of a food pantry by the tax authority without the participation of the national Parliament,” Freund said.

“We want EU funding to go to Hungary to build schools, put solar panels on the roofs, have fast internet everywhere and to provide social assistance to Hungarians who are most vulnerable,” he said.

“But we do not want EU funds to be used to enrich the family members and friends of Mr Orban, by breaking EU rules regarding fight against corruption and prevention of conflict of interest,” Freund added.

Tibor Navracsics said on Wednesday that he believed the European Parliament delegation had not read all the background material sent to them in advance.

According to media reports, he also claimed that political biases had influenced many MEPs’ opinions and that as a result factual errors have been made in some cases.

Among those were 16,000 shares of Cayman Islands based Teck Resources Ltd, Canada’s largest diversified mining firm. The shares were held shortly before the European Parliament passed a resolution slamming the role played by tax havens in encouraging and profiteering from tax avoidance.

“When investments take place through jurisdictions such as Cayman Islands and Bermuda, it should definitely make the alarm bells go off,” said Tove Maria Ryding of Tax Justice advocacy group.

Ryding said that although not all investments through these jurisdictions are problematic, they should definitely be a reason for introducing extra precaution and high standards of transparency.

The latest revelation also comes at a time when the European Parliament is trying to regain public trust in the wake of the Qatargate corruption scandal, where one of its now former vice-presidents is awaiting trial wearing a police ankle monitor.

The investments were made on the behalf of a so-called voluntary pension fund, a Luxembourg-based scheme that is currently running a €379m actuarial deficit and which may require a taxpayer bailout as as early as next year. MEPs at the time only had to contribute two years into the fund in order to then receive a pension for life.

The parliament’s secretive leadership, known as the Bureau, is currently scrambling for solutions in the hopes of avoiding another public relations disaster ahead of the 2024 European elections.

The issue has riled critical MEPs who have for years been piling on pressure for the Bureau to come up with answers but to no avail. Among them is Monika Hohlmeier, a German centre-right MEP who chairs the powerful budgetary control committee.

“The Voluntary Pensions Fund has been causing me serious headaches for some time now,” she said, in an email.

“When I now hear that the investment strategy included assets in tax heavens such as the Cayman Islands, then it just adds to the ever-growing list of problems this fund accumulated”, she said.

Coal mine shares aside, the fund also held numerous shares in the Bermudas, as well in other tax havens like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Switzerland. The fund eventually bounced back to pre-global financial crisis figures, noted asset managers in a 2011 report.

EUobserver obtained the list of investments spanning 1994 to 2010 from the Luxembourg business register.

But the breakdown of individual investments stops post 2010 with the European Parliament refusing to release any further details.

“The voluntary and complementary pension fund for MEPs was created in 1990, when there was no single statute for MEPs,” said a spokesperson from the European Parliament.

“The fund was closed in 2009, when the new MEPs’ single statute entered into force,” she said, noting the fund is a non-profit association governed by Luxembourgish law.

Although no longer open to MEPs since 2009, the fund is still making investments today on their behalf.

Asked about those investments, she said the European Parliament was unable to comment because the fund is a “third party”.

This comes despite the fund’s board being composed of sitting MEPs, including Janusz Lewandowski and European parliament vice-presidents Othmar Karas and Roberts Zile.

Zile is the parliament’s document gatekeeper. Late last year, he refused a freedom of information request filed by EUobserver to disclose additional information on the voluntary pension fund.

And earlier this month, the European Parliament passed its budget report and called upon the Bureau to clarify the entitlements of current and past MEPs stacking up multiple pensions.

The Greens had tabled an amendment demanding MEPs withdraw from the voluntary pension fund if they already receive another pension.

But that amendment was voted down 272 against 203. Among those rejecting it were Lewandowski, Karas, and Zile. The latter two are beneficiaries of the voluntary pension fund.

Other notable beneficiaries include the EU’s foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell as well as former European climate commissioner Miguel Arias Canete and others.