RESEARCH ARTICLE Measuring long‐term sustainability with shared socioeconomic pathways using an inclusive wealth framework Robi Kurniawan 1,2 | Shunsuke Managi 3,4 1 Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan 2 Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, Jakarta, Indonesia 3 Department of Urban and Environmental Engineering, Global Environmental Engineering Program, School of Engineering, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan 4 QUT Business School, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia Correspondence Shunsuke Managi, Department of Urban and Environmental Engineering, Global Environmental Engineering Program, School of Engineering, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka, Nishi‐ku, Fukuoka, Japan 819‐0395. Email: managi@doc.kyushu‐u.ac.jp; managi.s@gmail.com Funding information Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant/Award Number: 26000001 Abstract To understand the trajectory of sustainability, it is important to measure historical and future pro- jections of productive capital that contribute to wellbeing. This study considers a productive base that includes the human, natural and produced capital of 140 countries. We then develop projec- tions for 2014–2100 using the newly developed shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) that strive to explain the implications of key socioeconomic variables on long‐term global sustainabil- ity. Those SSPs with high investments in broad societal development are associated with the highest growth in inclusive wealth. Poverty alleviation, demographic changes and human capital investments are effective instruments to attain greater wealth as shown in East and Southeast Asia. Furthermore, the SSP that describes a sustainability pathway, which poses the least climate change challenges and substantially reduced reliance on natural resources, is more conducive to increasing wellbeing than the fragmented pathways that result in inequality. KEYWORDS human capital, inclusive wealth, long‐term sustainability, natural capital, SSPs, wellbeing 1 | INTRODUCTION The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include factors that contribute to equitable and sustainable wellbeing, have been agreed on by all UN countries. Global milestones of sustainable development have shifted from an emphasis on pollu- tion control and availability of natural resources to a more balanced position that places human development at the center (Quental, Lourenço, & Da Silva, 2011). Traced back to the “Brundtland Report,” sustainable development, mainly consists of three main pillars: economic growth, environmental stewardship and social justice among generations (Harlow, Golub, & Allenby, 2013). Based on cross‐country empirical findings, Mukherjee and Chakraborty (2013), and Kurniawan and Managi (2018b) confirm a closer association between sustainable development and socioeconomic, human development and sociopolit- ical factors. In sustainability terms, developed by unobserved flow‐ based data such as consumption, investment, employment, and government expenditure, gross domestic product (GDP) does not mea- sure all dimensions of societal progress (Schoenaker, Hoekstra, & Smits, 2015). Scholars have developed a method to relate the SDGs to overall measures of sustainable wellbeing that can motivate and guide the process of global societal change (see Costanza, Fioramonti, & Kubiszewski, 2016; Krank, Wallbaum, & Grêt‐Regamey, 2013; Morse, 2015; Radovanović & Lior, 2017). Developed from a welfare index covering consumption, leisure, mortality and inequality, Jones and Klenow (2016) found that the indicator is highly correlated with per‐ capita GDP but also deviates from it. Net domestic product (Asheim & Weitzman, 2001) and World Bank genuine savings account for the change in capital assets such as capital depreciation and natural capital depletion. Focusing on current consumption, which risks being exces- sive, and adopting the flow concept, the indicator is not sufficient for representing intergenerational wellbeing. The construction of a capi- tal‐based indicator focused on stock is important to consider long‐term sustainability. To measure their progress toward the SDGs, countries need a tool that comprehensively records inclusive wealth, including reproducible capital, human capital and natural capital (Dasgupta et al., 2015). Inclu- sive wealth uses a coherent approach that integrates biophysical and social measurements to indicate sustainability (Fenichel et al., 2016). In addition, inclusive wealth is theoretically consistent with the deter- minant of wellbeing in economics that has been applied to retrospec- tive evaluations (Collins, Selin, de Weck, & Clark, 2017). This approach focuses on the amounts of all types of capital that contribute Received: 21 September 2017 Revised: 15 December 2017 Accepted: 12 January 2018 DOI: 10.1002/sd.1722 Sustainable Development. 2018;1–10. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sd 1