A new approach to measuring green growth: Application to the OECD and Korea

•Balancing economic growth with depletion of natural assets is a policy imperative.•Using the OECD framework, this paper develops indicators to assess green growth.•Applying these, we show that Korea's past green growth lags in the economic sector.•We identify factors that can usher Korea into a paradigm of green growth.•This indicator framework can aid planning and assessing green growth strategies. Green growth, or environmentally sustainable economic growth, is imperative in light of current environmental crises and resource depletion. Green indicators and statistics can measure environmentally sustainable development; they thus enable evaluating green growth and support its integration into policy. As such, this study uses an OECD framework to select a set of 12 indicators, designed for cross-country comparisons of green growth strategies. These indicators are assessed for 30 countries, including South Korea. Current data for each international indicator is compared to the 10th percentile of OECD countries and evaluated on a scale of 1–10. South Korea ranked 17th among the 30: its natural capital and quality of life indexes are relatively high, but its economic activity scores (production, consumption, and trade) are relatively low. These findings suggest that production and consumption processes must be made more environmentally and economically sustainable. Given that South Korea's green growth strategy currently emphasizes economic value, the country is moving in the right direction and our analysis projects that economic activity scores will rise in the future. This study offers a novel tool for measuring overall effects of green growth strategies, providing the information necessary to re-shape national economic plans based on current circumstances.