Since the 21st century, growing number countries have realized that it is not a good index to measure development with GDP. It reflects the scale of economic growth but covers up many social and environmental losses as well. Scholars and decision-makers are starting to design new development index to replace GDP. But there still exist many difficulties and obstacles to replace GDP index with the newly proposed index in a short term. As for its reasons, three major influencing factors are as follows:

The first comes from “index factors”, namely, the theory foundation, methodology, information quality of the index itself affect the acceptation of the new development index. Green GDP, for example, requires to minus the monetized calculating losses in social and environmental aspects from the current GDP. But there are significant controversies and divergences in theories: One is that can the losses in society and environment be simply calculated by money? What’s the price of cutting a tree or filling up a river? People reckon that we are still using monetized economic scale to measure development; the other is that the green GDP presumes that there exists an infinite replaceability among material capital, human capital and natural capital, which leads to the losses of natural capital and social capital exceed the threshold of acceptance. If earnings of material capital can be large enough to offset these losses, the development will still be considered as sustainable. Besides, applying new development index still faces many problems, such as whether the data is accessible, whether there is an accumulation of time series or not and how to compare in a horizontal way and etc.

The second kind of influencing factor involves in “user factors”, namely, the experience and professional standards of the government as the index user, belief and preference as well as the system culture it relies on. Meanwhile, applying new development meets with the collision problems between overall development index and specific field management. For example, Green GDP, as an integrated indicator, considers comprehensively three aspects of economy, society and environment. The index can be used to estimates the general tendency of the development in a certain county, region or a city, but it has very limit practical significance to guide the classified management work in the government. Generally speaking, the management of government departments prefers specific and single index to an integrated index. For instance, economic sector enjoys a monetized GDP index, the environmental protection sector turns to use a materialized index such as the pollutant emission and etc, and social sector prefers non-economic index related to population. Applying green GDP index or other integrated index alone will always cover up the development crisis in a specific field by ignoring the severe problems of a certain specific index. Therefore, integrating earnings and performance in society and environment by monetized index always embraces resistance rather than impetus in non-economic government sector.

The third kind of influencing factor involves in “background factor”, namely, the application of index will be influenced by macroeconomic background and the development strategy and agenda of the government. By studying the history of economic thoughts, we can know that the trust and doubt to the GDP index is related to the change of economic development. During the period from 1960s to 1970s, people found the GDP is positively correlated with the social welfare when most countries’ GDP per capita is less than 10,000 US dollar. Thus, they support to use GDP as a measurement of the performance of development; but since the 21st century, the GDP per capita in developed countries have lost its positive correlation with social welfare. Therefore, people started to emphasize sustainable development and looked for new index to replace GDP. Even now, there still exists various rises and falls in society, especially in economic depression or downturn crisis period. From decision-makers to academics and even ordinary people, someone would stay on the beaten track to shake off economic crisis by GDP growth

By concluding all the theories mentioned above, we can see that there are twists and turns in applying a single new development index to replace traditional GDP index. Before the new development index becomes the mainstream, what we can do maybe is utilizing GDP to balance the economic growth of a country, a region or a city. But in order to measure the quality and benefit of economic growth, attentions should be paid on the index representing social development and social harmony except besides economy.

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