Gross National Product or Gross National Happiness? What should governments be striving for and how?

Sunday greetings from a very happy Pear Tree….

Twenty years ago I was travelling through Nepal and whilst it was very apparent that poverty existed, the country did not look like and feel like one of the poorest nations in the world. However, if you measured ‘wealth’ purely by GNP, Nepal was very close to the bottom of the league table. As I travelled through the country it was clear that a huge non-monetary, informal economy existed, in which a lot of business within and between villages did not hit the statistics. I guess this was the first time I started to question GNP.

Today, I view GNP as a valuable, but not the only measure of ‘progress’ we should be looking at. At the end of the day, you tend to get what you measure, so governments need to find indicators that take into account the “non-monetised” parts of the economy along with other aspects of wellbeing as part of a ‘balanced scorecard’ of progress.

This week’s class work and reading have shown me that a significant amount of thinking and work has taken place in this area and that progress is being made. However, we’re not there yet. There remain a number of challenges, in particular:

1. Agreeing a core set of measures to be adopted at both a national and international level. There seem to be a number of measures around but none has yet been adopted globally a la GNP
2. Agreeing what units to use in measurement.
3. Getting the new metrics top of mind so that they are quoted as a matter of course on programmes such as Today or News at Ten

We need advocates in the mainstream press and political parties to start to push the debate. It would be great if one of the major political parties took this issue into the mainstream in the run up to the election, but don’t hold your breath!