Express Trailers CEO believes economic results ‘not the only measure of success’

“New Zealand have taken the bold step of changing its national KPI from the long-standing measure of GDP to national well-being. Moving from hard numbers to what matters in society,” wrote Franco Azzopardi, Chairman and CEO of Express Trailers on social media.

He lauded the progressive country’s move as one that is “re-writing economics”, as well as one that assumes economic results are “not the only measure of success”.

Last year, New Zealand unveiled a world-first wellbeing budget that replaced the national metric of GDP with citizens’ health and prosperity. Mr Azzopardi, who heads logistics company Express Trailers, reflects on the benefits of this.

“It’s been hard-coded in people that economic wealth is the ultimate contributor to well-being even if we ultimately realise it’s not. At the same time, is well-being affected by economic prosperity? Most probably for the many of us mortals it is indeed,” he shared.

He added that the corporate world is increasingly moving towards sustainability, which is captured in the metric of ESG – Environmental, Societal and Corporate Governance.

“Question is, should ESG be a measure of business success or is business success a measure of ESG? I think one fuels the other in an iterative process. But I too believe that if the populace and the corporate players embrace sustainability, then both the well-being of people and GDP will gain.”