Results from the first ever attempt to produce National Accounts of Well-being are revealed in a new report and website launched today, Saturday 24 January. The report, National Accounts of Well-being: bringing real wealth onto the balance sheet, presents the most comprehensive international analyses of well-being ever produced highlighting key challenges for policy makers in the UK:
- The UK fares poorly on combined measures of social and personal well-being managing only 13th of the 22 European nations surveyed.
- People in the UK aged 16-24 report the lowest level of trust and belonging – a key element of social well-being – anywhere in Europe.
- nef is calling for governments to adopt National Accounts of Well-being as a powerful tool that could significantly enhance the effectiveness of public policy-making by providing a much better guide for the decisions that shape societies.
It has long been recognised that GDP – the standard measure of national income, relied on by politicians and commentators to assess the progress of nations – fails as a meaningful measure of social progress. It values only crude increases in income and takes no account of how fairly resources are distributed or the social and environmental damage caused by growth. A growing range of academics, commentators and politicians have been calling for new measures of progress. Now, nef has responded by producing the first ever set of national well-being statistics for Europe.
Entering a period of increased economic, social and environmental uncertainty, the consequences of the obsession with growth have become clear: a financial system increasingly disconnected from the real economy, unsustainable levels of debt and the strain placed on the planet by our high-consuming lifestyles. nef’s National Accounts of Well-being offer a timely and effective way to refocus our attention on the things that really matter. The accounts are built on two groups of measures: personal well-being and social well-being. Personal well-being describes people’s experiences of their positive and negative emotions, satisfaction, vitality, resilience, self-esteem and sense of purpose and meaning. Social well-being is made up of two main components: supportive relationships, and trust and belonging both of which are critical elements of overall well-being. Together, these indicators provide a headline picture of experienced quality of life across the 22 European nations for which data are available:
- The UK is ranked 13th, out of 22 European nations, when combining ratings for personal and social well-being, managing only 15th for social well-being and 13th for personal well-being alone.
- The UK fares particularly poorly compared to other Western European nations where we fall third from the bottom on both personal and social well-being
- Although people in the UK are relatively satisfied with their lives, they score poorly on measures of vitality and sense of meaning and engagement.
- Denmark, Switzerland and Norway show the highest levels of overall well-being, while Central and Eastern European countries such as the Ukraine, Bulgaria and Hungary have the lowest.
“Governments have lost sight of fact that their fundamental purpose is to improve the lives of their citizens. Instead they have become obsessed with maximising economic growth to the exclusion of other concerns, ignoring the impact that this has on people’s well-being. The UK’s long hours culture and record levels of personal debt, have squeezed out opportunities for individuals, families and communities to make choices and pursue activities that would best promote personal and social well-being. What’s more, the model of unending economic growth is fast taking us beyond environmental limits. These arguments make a compelling case for very different measures of human progress”
says Nic Marks, founder of the centre for well-being at nef.
