Measuring Well-Being " What is the aim of government? One answer is that it might be to maximise citizens' life satisfaction. Researchers have used a range of different approaches in order to know what makes people happy and how to judge whether a society is making progress to this goal. Mike Salvaris provides a very useful summary of the international development of social indicators which measure more than economic growth in "Community and social indicators: How citizens can measure progress". This is published by the Swinburne Institute for Social Research alongside "Tasmania Together arators - see "Structural Monitoring: International Benchmarking of Denmark" for more details. Finally, Partha Dasgupta and Karl-Göran Mäler argue that the usual measures of economic success are useful but shouldn't be used to measure well-being in a number of reports from the Beijer International Institute of Environmental Economics.

By Beijer International Institute of Environmental Economics , Australia, US, Denmark, Sweden.

Macro Economic Policy Resource.