Author: World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Health & Well-being has prepared this report to coincide with the Forum’s Annual Meeting 2012 in January in Davos-Klosters. In this report, they strongly support the need to measure well-being, but going beyond that to focus on what determines well-being – what helps and what hinders. They also look at the key contributions that can be made by individuals, governments and employers.

Edited by John Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs

Now we face a set of real choices. Should the world pursue GNP to the point of environmental ruin, even when incremental gains in GNP are not increasing much (or at all) the happiness of affluent societies? Should we crave higher personal incomes at the cost of community and social trust? Should our governments spend even a tiny fraction of the $500 billion or so spent on advertising each year to help individuals and families to understand better their own motivations, wants, and needs as consumers?

Author: The Centre for Well-being, nef

In November 2010, the UK Prime Minister asked the British Office for National Statistics to initiate a debate on national well-being and to start to measure it. If this is done well, the result will make a real difference to people's lives. This report by nef (the economics new fountation) looks at what is needed.

Author: OECD

"How’s Life?" is a first attempt at the international level to present the best set of comparable and comprehensive well-being indicators for advanced and emerging economies. These indicators feed into Your Better Life Index, the OECD's new interactive web-based tool that allows users to choose the weights they wish to attach to various dimensions of life according to their own preferences and to compare overall well-being across countries. Based on the experience of almost ten years of leading the reflection on better ways to measure progress, the OECD has identified key topics which are essential to well-being in terms of material living conditions (housing, income, jobs) and quality of life (community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance).

Drafted by Peter Anderson (ALICE RAP)

For ALICE RAP, the OECD frame is taken as a model to re-frame the understanding of addictions in contemporary European society and as a base to re-design addictions governance for better individual and societal well-being.