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: Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi (European Comission)

The report distinguishes between an assessment of current well-being and an assessment of sustainability, whether this can last over time. Current well-being has to do with both economic resources, such as income, and with non-economic aspects of peoples’ life (what they do and what they can do, how they feel, and the natural environment they live in). Whether these levels of well-being can be sustained over time depends on whether stocks of capital that matter for our lives (natural, physical, human, social) are passed on to future generations. To organise its work, the Commission organized itself into three working groups, focusing respectively on: Classical GDP issues, Quality of life and Sustainability. The following main messages and recommendations arise from the report.

Authors: Hetan Shah and Nic Marks (nef)

This well-being manifesto seeks to answer the question “what would politics look like if promoting people’s well-being was one of government’s main aims?” - by the nef (new economics foundation), UK.

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.