Measuring growth without measuring inequality? UoN scholars challenge the metrics that shape policy

What if economic growth, as currently measured, is telling only half the story or worse, masking the very inequalities it claims to address? This question is increasingly shaping global debates as economic expansion continues alongside deepening inequality, raising doubts about whether conventional indicators such as Gross Domestic Product and the Human Development Index still capture social reality.

These concerns formed the basis of an academic seminar hosted by the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Nairobi on Monday, 19 January 2026, that proposed a new analytical tool, the Elitist Growth Index designed to expose what scholars described as elitist growth: a system in which economic gains are systematically captured by political, economic and social elites.

According to Dr. Jean Luc Stalon, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative in Kenya, the problem is not simply inequality, but the way growth itself is organized and governed. He argues that dominant metrics such as GDP per capita and even widely used composite measures like the Human Development Index are increasingly unable to capture how economic benefits are systematically captured by a few, while exclusion becomes normalized for the many.

Dr. Stalon introduced the concept of “elitist growth”, a structural condition in which political, economic and social elites appropriate the dividends of growth through institutional and governance mechanisms designed to protect stakes. “In this book, I make the assumption that elitist growth is cross-ideology, cross-disciplinary, cross-boundary and cross-national,” he noted, emphasizing that the phenomenon is not confined to any one political system or region.

He illustrated this argument using global inequality trends, observing that since 2020, the world’s top one per cent have captured nearly two-thirds of newly created wealth, while ownership of productive resources such as land remains highly concentrated. These patterns, he argued, explain why growth can coexist with worsening insecurity, declining trust in institutions and shrinking opportunity for the majority.

It is this disconnect between growth and lived reality that prompted the proposal of a new analytical tool: the Elitist Growth Index (EGI).

Rather than treating inequality as an outcome, the EGI seeks to diagnose the conditions that produce and reproduce it. The index integrates economic, social and governance indicators, including income distribution, employment, taxation and wealth sharing, public investment in education and health, access to quality education, rule of law, voice and accountability and corruption. In doing so, it shifts attention from how much economies grow to who benefits, how and why.

The seminar was moderated by Prof. Fred Jonyo and opened by Dr. Solomon Owuoche, who represented Prof. Musambayi Katumanga, Chair of the Departmental Seminars, Publications and Research Committee. It formed part of the department’s 2026 Academic Seminar Series, which aims to advance critical scholarship on governance and public policy.

Discussing the paper, Dr. Roseanne Njeri of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and African Women Studies welcomed the EGI as a necessary intervention in inequality debates that too often focus on outcomes while ignoring production mechanisms. She described elitist growth as a system that produces “two economies in one city,” where access to quality services, security and opportunity is reserved for a protected minority.

Dr. Njeri highlighted procurement and tender capture, land concentration and inheritance, institutional gatekeeping and rent seeking as mechanisms through which elite advantage is reproduced across generations. She also drew attention to how inequality becomes normalized through labels such as national versus village schools, public versus private hospitals despite being funded by the same taxpayers.

Participants raised difficult questions that underscored the urgency of the index: How do we measure elite capture where data systems are weak? Can land concentration and inherited assets be tracked meaningfully in contexts like Kenya? How should transnational dynamics such as illicit financial flows or crisis-driven accumulation, including the emergence of “COVID-era billionaires,” be reflected in inequality metrics?

For Dr. Stalon, these questions are precisely the point. The EGI, he explained, is not intended as a ranking exercise, but as a diagnostic instrument, one that exposes uncomfortable truths about how economies function beneath the surface of growth statistics. The framework is further developed in his forthcoming book on elitist growth, expected to be published in the coming months.

As debates around inclusive growth, governance reform and development financing intensify, the seminar left participants with a broader challenge: What does it mean to pursue growth if our tools cannot tell us whom it truly serves? Moreover, how many inequalities remain invisible simply because we are not measuring the right things?

Through scholarly interventions such as the Elitist Growth Index, the University of Nairobi continues to position itself as a critical space for questioning dominant narratives and advancing ideas that speak directly to lived realities.