National Accounts of Well-being

National Accounts of Well-being presents a radical, robust proposal to guide the direction of modern societies and the lives of people who live in them. It demonstrates why national governments should directly measure people’s subjective well-being: their experiences, feelings and perceptions of how their lives are going. It calls for these measures to be collected on a regular, systematic basis and published as National Accounts of Well-being. The measures are needed because the economic indicators which governments currently rely on tell us little about the relative success or failure of countries in supporting a good life for their citizens.

Seventy-five years ago the original architects of systems of national accounts were clear that welfare could not be inferred from measures of national income alone. They were careful to document the range of factors national accounts failed to capture such as the unpaid work of households, the distribution of income and the depletion of resources. Yet initial hopes for the development of better indicators of welfare were fast derailed. The demands of wartime prioritised maximising the productive capacity of the economy over other considerations, at just the time when the accounting frameworks themselves were being refined and improved. The size of the economy – as defined by Gross Domestic Product – was quickly seized on as a convenient measure of national achievement. In the aftermath of the Second World War, overall productivity became firmly entrenched as the key hallmark of a country’s overall success and widely interpreted as a proxy for societal progress, with damaging consequences for people and the planet.

Advances in the measurement of well-being mean that now we can reclaim the true purpose of national accounts as initially conceived and shift towards more meaningful measures of progress and policy effectiveness which capture the real wealth of people’s lived experience.

As we enter a period of increasing economic, social and environmental uncertainty, this need becomes ever greater and more urgent. A myopic obsession with growing the economy has meant that we have tended to ignore its negative impacts on our well-being such as longer working hours and rising levels of indebtedness. It has created an economic system which has systematically squeezed out opportunities for individuals, families and communities to make choices and pursue activities which play a role in promoting positive well-being and human flourishing. All this is underpinned by a fiscal system which, as recent events have exposed, has run out of control. Add to this the fact that the model we have been following – of unending economic growth – is taking us beyond our environmental limits and the case for very different measures of human progress and policy evaluation become compelling.

National accounting indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have only ever revealed a very narrow view of human welfare. Worse, they have obscured other vital parts of the economy: the core economy of family, neighbourhood, community and society, and the natural economy of the biosphere, our oceans forests and fields. We now need to shift towards more meaningful measures of progress which capture the richness of people’s lived experience. Do so and we also create a far more effective tool with which to guide policy.

This report aims to fundamentally re-evaluate orthodox ideas of what we should collectively value, and hence what we should measure. It lays out a framework for developing National Accounts of Well-being to provide:

• A new way of assessing societal progress. National Accounts of Well-being, by explicitly capturing how people feel and experience their lives, help to redefine our notions of national progress, success and what we value as a society.
• A cross-cutting and more informative approach to policy-making. The challenges now facing policy-makers, including the ‘triple crunch’ of financial crisis, climate change and oil price shocks, are unprecedented. Silo working has long been criticised; now – when the need for systemic change is clear and present – it must be overcome. National Accounts of Well-being – by capturing population well-being across areas of traditional policy-making, and looking beyond narrow, efficiency-driven economic indicators – provide policy-makers with a better chance of understanding the real impact of their decisions on people’s lives.
• Better engagement between national governments and the public. By resonating with what people care about, National Accounts of Well-being provide opportunities for national governments to reconnect with their citizens and, in doing so, to address the democratic deficit now facing many European nations.

A framework for National Accounts of Well-being
Well-being is most usefully thought of as the dynamic process that gives people a sense of how their lives are going through the interaction between their circumstances, activities and psychological resources or ‘mental capital’. Whilst a combination of objective and subjective factors are important for assessing well-being, it is the subjective dimensions which have, to date, been lacking in any assessment by national governments. National Accounts of Well-being address this gap.

The challenge is to match the multiplicity and dynamism of what constitutes and contributes to people’s well-being with what gets measured. Our recommended framework for National Accounts of Well-being is therefore based on capturing:

• More than life satisfaction. Understanding subjective well-being as a multifaceted, dynamic combination of different factors has important implications for the way in which it is measured. This requires indicators which look beyond single item questions and capture more than simply life satisfaction.
• Personal and social dimensions. Research shows that a crucial factor in affecting the quality of people’s experience of life is the strength of their relationships with others. Our approach, therefore, advocates a national accounting system which measures the social dimension of well-being (in terms of individuals’ subjective reports about how they feel they relate to others) as well as the personal dimension.
• Feelings, functioning and psychological resources. The traditional focus on happiness and life satisfaction measures in well-being research has often led to an identification of well-being with experiencing good feelings and making positive judgements about how life is going. Our framework for National Accounts of Well-being moves beyond that to also measure how well people are doing, in terms of their functioning and the realisation of their potential. Psychological resources, such as resilience, should also be included in any national accounts framework and reflect growing recognition of ‘mental capital’ as a key component of well-being.

These elements have been incorporated to produce empirical findings from a working model of National Accounts of Well-being. The findings are compiled from data collected in a major 2006/2007 European cross-national survey through a detailed module of well-being questions, designed by the University of Cambridge, nef (the new economics foundation) and other partners. This represents the most comprehensive dataset on subjective well-being for any nation to date.

Our working model is built on two headline measures which capture personal well-being and social well-being, reflecting crucial aspects of how people experience their lives. Personal well-being is broken down into five main components with a number of subcomponents: emotional well-being (positive feelings and absence of negative feelings); satisfying life; vitality; resilience and self-esteem (self-esteem, optimism and resilience); and positive functioning (which covers autonomy, competence, engagement, and meaning and purpose). Social well-being is made up of two main components: supportive relationships, and trust and belonging. In addition to these indicators, an example of a well-being indicator within a specific area of people’s lives was also created – a satellite indicator of well-being at work. This measures job satisfaction, satisfaction with work-life balance, the emotional experience of work, and assessment of work conditions.

To enable analysis of how different nations are faring in relation to their well-being, indicators were created by standardising and transforming the data so that all results are presented on 0–10 scales, with a score of 5 always representing the average score across the 22 European countries included in the dataset.

Findings from our working model
nef’s National Accounts of Well-being reveal some surprising results in the picture of the relative progress of European countries. Thus, whilst Denmark retains its oft-cited position as having the highest levels of well-being in Europe, other rankings of countries on personal and social well-being deviate from what might be expected. Sweden, for example, so often singled out to be praised for its policy success is within the top five nations on social well-being, but does not feature as one of the highest performers regarding the personal well-being of its citizens.

The findings reveal:

• Countries with high levels of personal well-being do not necessarily have high levels of social well-being, and vice versa. Denmark and Ukraine display unusual stability in coming at the very top and very bottom, respectively, of rankings based on both personal and social well-being scores. In between them, all but two of the other twenty countries change positions. It is striking, for example, that all the Central and Eastern European countries except Slovenia have higher scores for social than for personal well-being and the Iberian nations Portugal and Spain have considerably greater average levels of social well-being than personal well-being. A key task for policy-makers highlighted by this finding is therefore one of identifying the economic, social, and political structures in these countries which succeed in promoting the elements of social well-being beyond the levels expected from examining personal well-being.
• Scandinavian countries are the top performers on overall well-being, whilst Central and Eastern European countries have the lowest well-being. When combining personal and social well-being into an overall index of well-being for each country – using a weighting of 2:1 – we see that Denmark, Switzerland and Norway show the highest levels of overall well-being, whilst Central and Eastern European countries such as the Ukraine, Bulgaria and Hungary have the lowest. The UK is ranked 13th, out of 22 European nations, when combining its personal and social well-being scores. Despite its relative economic success at the time the survey data were collected, this summary measure therefore reveals the UK’s distinctly middling performance on well-being overall.
• Levels of well-being inequality vary considerably between nations. Whilst there is no consistent link between the overall level of personal or social well-being in a country and the degree to which levels of well-being are equally dispersed within the population, it is clear that some countries experience higher levels of well-being inequality than others. For example, whilst Austria and Switzerland have similar average levels of personal well-being, in Switzerland there is relatively little variation in those levels between individuals, whereas in Austria there are many more individuals at both the high and low ends of the scale. For both social and personal well-being, many of the highest levels of dispersion are in Central and Eastern European countries, but it is noteworthy that Austria, Belgium and the UK have similarly high levels of dispersion. This raises an important question for societies to consider: what level of well-being inequality, if any, is ever justifiable?

In order to understand the constituents of well-being more fully, we developed diagrams – Well-being Profiles – which display the character of well-being for a particular country or group. These allow the different components of well-being to be examined and implications for policy-makers drawn out, and demonstrate that:

• Well-being Profiles reveal remarkable variation across European nations. For example, Estonia, Portugal and Hungary are ranked closely on the headline personal well-being scores, but display very different pictures of well-being. Estonia’s Well-being Profile shows it scoring at or slightly below the European average for each well-being component, but without any scores that stand out as extremely low compared to the others. Portugal shows a more mixed picture, while Hungary shows some particularly marked contrasts, with a very low score for emotional well-being – absence of negative feelings and a considerably above-average score for trust and belonging.
• Comparing Well-being Profiles helps to uncover differences in countries which are similar on other measures of national welfare. For example, Finland and France have very similar levels of GDP per capita and have the same score on the UN’s Human Development Index (which combines measures of GDP, life expectancy and knowledge and education), but France ranks substantially below Finland on both personal and social well-being. Finland’s Well-being Profile shows it coming only slightly above average on all components of well-being, apart from the emotional well-being – negative feelings and satisfying life components, where its performance is substantially above average. A similar pattern can in fact be seen in the Well-being Profiles of each of the Scandinavian countries. France’s Well-being Profile, on the other hand, presents a much more consistent picture, with scores close to the average on all well-being components, and none that are particularly high or low. Well-being Profiles therefore provide a clear picture of how policy to bolster population well-being in each country might need either to be closely targeted on particular components, or aimed at improving well-being more generally.

Further important policy-relevant findings come from examining well-being within specific national contexts, and from looking at the relationship between the objective circumstances of people’s lives and their well-being:

• Within the UK, clear differences emerged in the character of people’s well-being between population groups. The Well-being Profiles of the youngest and oldest age groups in the UK reveal some striking differences in their well-being composition and levels with particular disparity for the trust and belonging component, with a very low score for the youngest age group and a high score for the oldest. A question for UK policy-makers is therefore whether they should specifically aim to build feelings of trust and belonging among young people, or, understanding that these feelings change through the life course, target their resources elsewhere?
• The relationship between the conditions of people’s lives and their subjective experiences of life is complex and demands a textured assessment of well-being to be fully understood. Some objective factors have fairly consistent relationships with all the components of well-being. For example, volunteering is associated with moderately increased scores on all components of personal well-being. Similarly, being hampered in daily activities by being ill or disabled is associated with decreased scores, although with stronger effects for components of personal rather than social well-being. Other objective circumstances and behaviours, however, relate differently to the different components. For instance, spending more time watching television predicts decreased scores for the satisfying life, vitality, functioning and trust and belonging components, but not for emotional well-being, resilience or supportive relationships. The results suggest that reducing deficits (e.g. illness, involuntary unemployment, fear of crime) remains an important goal of national level policy-making if population well-being is to be enhanced. They also show, however, that promoting positive well-being has a vital role to play, for example by encouraging intrinsic values, trust in institutions and participation in local activities.

Where do we go from here?
We are not alone in recognising the need for, and calling for, a new approach. There is a burgeoning international movement questioning the utility of economic indicators and exploring what it might mean to capture true measures of well-being, not simply material wealth. In January 2008 the French President Nicholas Sarkozy set up a special commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress. Earlier, in 2005, the prominent UK economist Richard Layard called on governments to monitor the well-being of their citizens. Layard’s highly influential book Happiness argued that the economic model of human nature used by policy-makers is ‘far too limited’ and that ‘[h]appiness should become the goal of policy, and the progress of national happiness should be measured and analysed as closely as the growth of GNP.’ In 2007 the UK Conservative Party’s Quality of Life Policy Group noted that ‘in wealthy countries, a continuing increase in economic growth, is not increasing wellbeing’ and advocated the development of a ‘more reliable indicator of progress than GDP’.

This is matched by considerable support among the public for governments to use broader measures of progress. A UK poll found 81 per cent of people supported the idea that the Government’s prime objective should be the ‘greatest happiness’ rather than the ‘greatest wealth’.3 Similarly, an international survey found that three-quarters of respondents believed that health, social and environmental statistics were as important as economic ones and should be used to measure national progress.

Creating a system of National Accounts of Well-being, however, is an ambitious and significant undertaking that will ultimately require extensive co-operation between governments, academics, citizens and many others. The framework presented in this report, and upon which the working model and empirical findings are based, represents the first serious attempt to describe what National Accounts of Well-being might look like, which we hope will be further built on and developed.

A number of key recommendations are identified in the report to stimulate further debate and action.

Actions for national governments

• Make manifesto commitments to National Accounts of Well-being
  
  National governments and political parties across Europe should pledge a manifesto commitment to introduce new measures of progress and, more particularly, to adopt National Accounts of Well-being. In the UK, nef is seeking a manifesto commitment from all three of the major political parties to develop National Accounts of Well-being.
• Task national statistical offices to measure well-being
  
  Listening to, learning from and building the capacity of our statistical experts in the drive towards National Accounts of Well-being is crucial. We recommend the establishment of a well-being network of national statistics bodies bringing together senior statisticians and analysts from across Europe’s national statistical offices and from Eurostat, the statistical office for Europe. The role of the network should be to advise on the development of National Accounts of Well-being, to shape the implementation of well-being indicators in national surveys, and to work alongside policy-makers to explore how the results might be used in practice.
• Measure and act on well-being within the broader context of societal and environmental sustainability
  
  The broader context to National Accounts of Well-being must be a continued feature of discussion and action as they are further developed. This report focuses specifically on people’s subjective well-being and quality of life. However we do not claim this to be the only goal worth pursuing or one which should be elevated to the detriment of specific population groups, future generations or the ecosystem on which we all depend. nef’s vision is that efforts to take forward the measurement of people’s well-being are situated within a broader framework, also concerned with social justice and environmental sustainability. There is therefore a need for ongoing work to identify how to best operationalise a multilayered, broad framework of indicators which combines these elements to measure progress and inform policy.

Developing global, regional and local momentum

• Encourage the European Parliament and European Commission to take a leading role
  
  As representatives of citizens’ views at a European level, MEPs need to ensure effective engagement with citizens around the issue of well-being and commit to action, both in the run-up to the European Parliamentary elections in June 2009 and beyond. The European Council also has a role to play in this issue by encouraging co-operation between member states; implementing well-being-based key progress indicators at EU level; and fostering discussion of related international initiatives, such as the outcomes from the OECD Global Project on ‘Measuring the Progress of Societies’ and results from the Stiglitz Commission when it reports in April 2009.
• Promote greater dialogue between international, national and local actors in the development of well-being accounts
  
  Alongside the work taking place to develop National Accounts of Well-being, substantial activity around the measurement of well-being is also evident at supra-national and sub-national levels. We encourage the assessment of well-being at these different spatial scales and urge further dialogue and joined up action amongst all those involved in taking this forward, both within and between countries to explore whether, for example, there are some components of population well-being which are of greater relevance at a local level compared to national level, or vice versa and how best to keep the public informed about the outcomes of well-being measurement at different scales in ways which are clear, accessible and of interest.

Achieving broad engagement across society

• Mobilise public support
  
  In order to exert political pressure and to stimulate debate about the role of well-being measures in matters of national policy, greater mobilisation of the public is required. There is a need to find effective mechanisms to engage the public on this issue and to communicate about it in a way which highlights its relevance to people’s day-to-day life. To support this process, the accompanying website allows individuals to measure their own well-being and compare it to national results, and to join the call for their national government to systematically measure well-being.
• Stimulate further exploration, analysis and dialogue about both the early findings and potential structure of National Accounts of Well-being
  
  Through this report nef has started to explore these issues but there is much more to learn from the data on national well-being and further debate to be had about how this can best be brought together in ways useful for policy. Building on this report, we must now facilitate researchers, analysts, policy-makers, citizens, parliamentarians, media officials, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and others to come together to engage in international and national dialogue about the what, why and how of National Accounts of Well-being.

The interactive website – www.nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org – which sits alongside this report will, we hope, facilitate this dialogue. We invite everyone with an interest in the future of our society and the quality of people’s experience of life to visit the site to explore the national accounts framework, indicator components, and data in more detail, and to contribute to discussions about making National Accounts of Well-being a reality.

The ideas outlined in this report regarding the development of National Accounts of Well-being speak to the very heart of what it is we value as a society, calling for a fundamental rethink about our notions of progress and a transformation in the way in which we plan, deliver and evaluate policies which aim to improve people’s lives. We now have compelling evidence to show that our current economic model and economic accounting frameworks are hugely limited, and that a shift to measuring success in terms of well-being is not only desirable, but necessary, if societies are to truly flourish.