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).

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.

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: 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.

Authors: Jon Hall, Enrico Giovannini, Adolfo Morrone and Giulia Ranuzzi (OEDC)
Over the last three decades, a number of frameworks have been developed to promote and measure well-being, quality of life, human development and sustainable development. Some frameworks use a conceptual approach while others employ a consultative approach, and different initiatives to measure progress will require different frameworks. The aim of this paper by the OECD is to present a proposed framework for measuring the progress of societies, and to compare it with other progress frameworks that are currently in use around the world. The framework does not aim to be definitive, but rather to suggest a common starting point that the authors believe is broad-based and flexible enough to be applied in many situations around the world. It is also the intention that the framework could be used to identify gaps in existing statistical standards and to guide work to fill these gaps.