For years, the Gross Domestic Product was used to measure the development of a country. The scientific debate has warned both the use of the indicator as a measure of economic growth, as it ignores the non-market goods and services, illegal activities, negative externalities or quality of public expenditure, both as a measure of well-being or quality of life. The remedies offered by international organizations seek to provide a more realistic measure of the social, political, economic and environmental performance of a country; however, the composite indexes proposed are mainly the result of a Western conception. The author, after having introduced the main indexes and the results applied to a set of European and Latin American countries, suggests an index based on the Andean cosmovision of buen vivir which highlights the relationship with the land and the community, the balance with nature and the psychological well-being.
