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.

Author: Office for National Statistics (ONS)

To measure national well-being it is important not just to rely on traditional indicators of economic progress, but also to collect information from people themselves about how they assess their own well-being. Individual or subjective well-being estimates are an important addition to existing official statistics and this research report presents experimental statistics from the ONS Opinions Survey (OPN) looking at the levels of subjective well-being in the British population during April to August 2011.

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.

Author: OECD

In recent years, concerns have emerged regarding the fact that macro-economic statistics did not portray the right image of what ordinary people perceived about the state of their own lives. Addressing these concerns is crucial, not just for the credibility and accountability of public policies, but for the very functioning of our democracies. The OECD has been leading the international reflection on this challenge through various projects and initiatives.
The publication of a set of well-being indicators for developed and selected emerging economies is an important new contribution to this debate.

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.